


Walk Tall Beneath These Trees

by narceus



Category: Glee
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Werewolf, F/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-07-16
Updated: 2011-08-08
Packaged: 2017-10-21 11:10:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 27,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/224539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/narceus/pseuds/narceus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ohio Territory isn't a friendly place for werewolves.  Especially in a world like this, nobody makes it alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Ohio Territory Is For Lovers

**Author's Note:**

> So begins the epic journey. A thousand thanks to crown_of_weeds every step of the way. Story title from 'Wolf Song', by Patrick Wolf; chapter title bastardized from 'Ohio is for Lovers', by Hawthorne Heights.
> 
> In this chapter: Quinn never asked for any of this. Puck and Santana wouldn't give it up for anything. Finn is just trying to understand.

Ohio Territory isn't a good place for wolves.

They're around if you go looking for them, out into the dense patches of the Great Eastern Forest where the good asphalt roads don't quite reach. There are usually one or two scratching out a half-tamed living on the edges of any good-sized town, and Chief Sue Sylvester's troop of trained hunters walk right through the streets of Lima, collars flashing like talismans. Collars or no, even they know better than to bother anyone unless it's on her orders.

Ohio Territory is that kind of place. Oh, it's still more woods than farmland, but they're friendly and well-traveled woods, good for hunting, and logging, and quiet strolls with your lover. There are the inevitable few witches willing to get all the proper certifications who're working at making an honest living, a few other, not-quite-human things tucked away in back corners and out of sight, because there always are, really, even right in Nassau County if you look hard enough. But it's not like the badlands out in Sonora Territory, or those places up in Acadia where the Great Eastern Forest gets to the mountains and half the territory just runs wild.

Mostly, Ohio Territory is for people. It has more good-sized villages and towns than anywhere west of New York itself. Lima's nearly large enough to count as a small city if you judge it against the standards of one of the smaller provinces instead of by Nassau. The rivers all have dams and water wheels. Electric generators are easy to come by and fuel isn't too hard. It's a good, civilized sort of place.

There are reports, once or twice every six months or so: maulings out in the deep parts of the woods during a full moon, livestock disappearing, some poor unfortunate getting bitten. Chief Sylvester's wolves go out then, streaks of gray and brown and the sound of distant howls as they tear through the woods to drag the culprit in by the throat. It's always a messy business.

But what can you expect? An animal's an animal. It's not the werewolf's fault it can't help but kill.

 

~~~

~

 

This is the first time Quinn's neck has been bare since her fourteenth birthday. Breathing feels funny, the throb of her throat against the empty place where her collar used to sit. That has to be the reason why breathing feels funny right now.

Sue's being generous, she's giving Quinn half an hour to pack and letting her keep most of the clothes and trinkets she's accumulated over ten years of being one of Sue's wolves. Not the weapons, of course, that would be totally illegal and irresponsible; not the Team Leader's pair of gleaming silver-coated knives and the sheath harness that always stayed with her no matter what shape she was in. Not the collar that always made every shopkeeper in Lima stand up and take notice, even the ones with NO DOGS signs right in their front windows. But her hairbrush. The little inlaid box that she uses for the silver cross necklace her mother gave her years ago that she can't touch bare-handed any more. The little fluttery dresses she wears when she's not in uniform, that make her feel almost human again.

There's not enough room in her heavy canvas duffel bag, but there's not enough time to sort through and pick and choose, and maybe she shouldn't be bringing anything along anyway. The full moon's in three days. Quinn will make better time on four feet than two. God knows she can't stay in Lima any more.

Better to pack it, though, better to try and run with it now and get rid of it later when she has time to think, when she can breathe again past the band of cold air wrapping around her throat where Sue used to make her safe. At least if she abandons the whole bag somewhere in the woods the other girls in the kennel won't be able to rip through her belongings, squabbling and fighting over who gets what. Santana's getting the knives, Quinn's sure. Let her enjoy them.

In the end her bag is only half full. She spends too long staring at the bed, wondering if she should try to bring the quilt or one of the pillows, wondering how feral werewolves sleep on nights with no moon. In all these years of hunting them down in their dens, she's never really thought about it.

In the end she has the boots on her feet, the clothes on her back, a few dresses and a few dollars cash. She doesn't own any pants that aren't part of her uniform. She'd never spent enough time out of it to think about that before, either. She hopes she doesn't have to run too soon. This skirt isn't made for the woods.

The Chief is waiting at the front gates of the kennel, Becky sitting at her side, growling low. Becky spends more time in wolf form than out, but she watches everything, even if only Chief Sylvester can tell what she thinks about it. Santana's there too, of course. The only real surprise is that half the troop isn't out front to watch her fall. Then again, they were all there when Sue took her collar off in the mess hall this afternoon. That has to be enough drama for anybody's day.

"Sorry to see it end this way, Q," Chief says, sounding almost regretful. "You had some skills. Shame to see you blow it like this."

"I never wanted this to happen," Quinn says, a little too desperately for what little pride she has left. "I'm sorry. I didn't--"

"Should've thought of that before you started sniffing around Hudson in the first place," says the Chief. "I can't have my wolves mingling with people like that. Sets a bad example. Next thing you know you've got half-breeds running around all over the place and there's rioting in the streets."

And it's so unfair, because Quinn knows that Sue knows Brittany and Santana don't bother to limit their conquests to their own species, that not all of Puck's bitches have worn collars. Sue doesn't always care unless the wrong mood strikes her, though, so long as everyone involved remembers to stick to meaningless animalistic fucking. It's the feelings that aren't allowed.

"You know the rules, Q. Get the hell out of here and don't let me see you again. I don't like it when I know my rugs' names, puts me off my morning protein shake." Everyone always says that Sue Sylvester is frozen through. Quinn supposes she always knew it, but even so, it's a trickle of iceberg down her spine.

"Later, Quinn," Santana promises, far too sweetly for the threat it implies. "I'll be sure to keep Puckerman warm for you." Like Quinn had wanted him, like she'd ever wanted him, like she'd ever wanted any of the filth and the fur and the drool and and the nastiness of being a werewolf at all.

"You two just make sure you don't catch any more fleas," Quinn says, just as sweetly. Then she shoulders her bag and turns down the road towards the sun, head held just as high as she's ever carried it despite the glare in her eyes, damp spring breeze kissing her throat like a welcome.

This is all, completely, 100% Finn Hudson's fault.

 

~~~

 

Finn Hudson's life story is pretty easy to summarize. Finn's a pretty nice guy. That's about it.

The town of McKinley where he grew up had about five or six hundred inhabitants, all but one of them people, and that one was about as tame as Finn figured a werewolf could be. There were some farms, some fields, a sawmill up at the north end run by Henri St. Pierre, a leather tannery just out of town to the east where the wind mostly blew the smell away.

Finn wasn't actually a farmboy, because his mom had to sell the farm when he was six when his father didn't make it back from the eastern front in Havannah. By the time he was seventeen he could handle a horse without hurting himself and a truck without hurting anyone else, fix an engine, field-dress a deer, and hit what he aimed at with a shotgun at least half of the time. He couldn't really sew, or cook, or tell which of the mushrooms out in the forest were the ones he was supposed to bring home for his mom to make dinner and which were the ones he was to bring to Mr. Hendershott, who bought the old farm, to dry down and use for rat poison, but that was okay. Mom and Mr. Hendershott were pretty good at telling the difference by then.

There was space for him in McKinley if he'd wanted to stay, if he hadn't been his father's son. Finn hasn't seen his dad in twenty years, but he remembers: Christopher Hudson dressed in his traveling uniform crouching down in the dust of the yard outside their front door, one hand on each of Finn's shoulders, eyes he can't quite picture but his mother says looked so much like his own.

"Promise me you'll look after your mom," he said, and Finn said, "I promise."

"And the farm," he continued. "All the dogs, and Sugar and Lancey, and the new kittens, and the goat." And Finn was only a little bit more than four and pretty sure the goat had tried to eat him last week, but he said, "I promise."

"You're the man around here now," said Christopher. "That means you have to take care of anyone who's smaller or weaker than you are. Do you understand?"

"I understand," said Finn, who was only a little bit more than four, and only barely understood that his father wasn't going to be back next week just like when he went up to Cinncinatti for the market.

"Do you promise?" prodded Christopher.

"I promise," said Finn, who really was only just a little bit more than four, but already knew the value of a promise like that. You had to keep it until the person you'd promised to said you were done, no matter what.

Of course nowadays, everybody was smaller than Finn. His dad had probably expected to get back before he got quite so tall.

He eventually figured out that his dad probably hadn't meant he had to look after everyone in the whole world, but he could at least help take care of Ohio Territory. Chris Hudson went off to war and died to protect the Empire. And even Finn could see it would pretty much destroy his mother if he did the same thing, but he could at least go all the way to the headquarters of the Territory Sheriff in Lima.

Finn is a good deputy. He's usually fair, and he always listens to what the victim has to say after a crime, and he can throw a pretty good punch when he has to. He's been promoted three times in the last five years, because he's one of the only deputies who's not scared to work with Chief Sylvester's werewolves and somebody's got to be the departmental liaison. Werewolves that threaten the peace in Ohio Territory are automatically Chief Sylvester's to deal with, but sometimes they scrape along kind of close to human law. Finn took an oath to serve and protect. He's pretty sure it's not supposed to matter what he's protecting people from.

None of this really explains why he, his shotgun, and a bag more full of bullets than anything else are loaded into the front seat of his pickup truck, roaring down the main road east out of town, not a badge in sight.

 

~~~

 

Santana stays poised behind Chief Sylvester and to the left for as long as Quinn stays in sight, every muscle held in the perfect relaxed tension of ready stillness. Becky stares and growls a soft, continuous threat without urgency.

Santana's never met a person besides Chief Sylvester who didn't underestimate Becky. People see her walking along at the Chief's side like a dog so often they start to think she's dumb like one. Becky's got about as much patience for human ways of doing things as she has for her human body. Santana doesn't really blame her.

"You and Brittany tried to seduce that deputy six months ago, didn't you?" the Chief asks without taking her eyes off the road.

"He wasn't interested," Santana says carelessly. "He was freaked out before we even got a chance to offer. Seemed like a waste of our time."

"And you didn't happen to notice that he wasn't interested because he was already tail-to-testicles with your own Team Leader?" Chief continues.

"They weren't sleeping together then," Santana says with absolute certainty. Yeah, the whole 'secret romance' thing kind of crept up on her, but there is no way she and Brittany would have missed that.

"Hmm," says Chief Sylvester. Quinn crests the last ridge out of town. She doesn't pause for a moment to be dramatically silhouetted against the sky or anything, even though the sun's totally at the right angle for it, just takes two or three more steps as even as all the ones that have come before and disappears from view.

"If I were you, I'd keep all my little paws crossed about that Team Leader spot," Chief says. "If you're lucky, the whole rest of the troop will spend the next few weeks being even more disappointing than usual and I won't be able to give it to somebody competent enough that they might actually notice a secret affair going on right in front of their noses."

"Yes, Chief," Santana says obediently, and waits for the signal to move.

"Go on, get out of my sight," Chief says. "I've had enough of dealing with cocky bitches and their delusions of specialness to last me until the next full moon."

Santana's through the gate and halfway to her dorm on the other side of the kennel before Chief Sylvester's even finished the sentence.

 

~~~

 

Puck met the Chief kind of late, for a troop wolf. She has most of her werewolves in training at the Lima kennel well before they hit sixteen. Puck was almost eighteen, when he finally came by. His mother calls him a late bloomer.

If asked, Puck would say it was his natural charm and obvious talent that persuaded Chief Sylvester to take him anyway. If she were asked, Sue would say that she wanted him under her thumb for as long as possible so that when he inevitably goes rogue, her wolves will know him well enough to be able to tear him to shreds without even needing to breathe hard.

Being one of Sue's wolves is kind of all perk, except for the boring working parts. He'd known about the sweet paycheck and the social currency that would let him actually spend it, but none of the stray wolf bitches he'd run into back when he was still roaming the backwoods of Akron Valley had ever been this willing to give it up. Sure, maybe some of that had to do with him being fifteen and still kinda spindly, but Puck prefers to believe that he's always been a stud, it's just that now he has the status to make people notice it.

And then there's the collar. It's all metal with no clasp, but it lays flat over his fur and snug against his skin no matter how he twists or moves his neck. Everyone says Chief Sylvester makes them herself. Puck's pretty sure the Chief's got more important things to do than weave hundreds of tiny metal links into fine mesh, but hey, who knows? She's definitely the one who put the magic on them--spells for extra strength, quicker healing, to let them always find each other. Enough magic to keep that much silver from killing anybody who wears it. And not that he's ever seen it happen or anything, but Puck's pretty sure the Chief knows exactly how to take all the spells off some wolf's collar and watch the silver poisoning eat them from the inside out.

Nobody knows that much about Chief Sue. She's a witch, everyone's pretty much got that, but she's one of the most respected figures in the Ohio Territory anyway. Everybody Puck's ever met, wolves, people, everybody is at least a little scared of her.

The really confusing thing is, she talks like a werewolf sometimes. Her smell is impossible to figure out even if he jabbed a nose right into her hand, the white part of lightning and the tangy part of silver, the round sort of edges of sweat from someone who isn't afraid, something smooth and hard and chemical, and as many different melodies of wolfmusk as the kennel itself. It makes no sense in words that fit on a human tongue, but the thing is, if Puck said any of that, the Chief would understand. She'd want to know why the hell he felt the need to describe her own scent to her, but she'd understand how he was saying it. And Puck's never met another not-wolf who could do that.

She might be a werewolf. Like, it's not outside the realm of possibility. Puck's never seen her on a full moon night. Everyone whose team isn't on duty gets an out-of-town pass to run a little wild on full moon nights, and everyone whose team is on duty spends their watch running through drills until they break off into wrestling and fucking on the practice ground. Sure, apparently some of the humans have seen her out and around town, but it's not like you have to change at the moon. Especially not if you're a witch like Sue. Puck doesn't know why anyone ever wouldn't want to, not when the moonlight is coming down and filling you up with more life than any human body can hold. But if Sue had a reason, she could definitely pull it off.

Even those poor domesticated bastards who actually lock themselves in cages change on full moon nights. Puck almost--almost--understands the cages for the ones who've been bitten, especially if they were old and used to being human all the time already. But the ones who've been wolves all their life? Who've spent minimum thirteen nights a year smelling colors and tasting sound since before their human mouths could talk? No fucking excuse. Pussies. Might as well be cats.

If Puck misses anything about life before coming to Lima, besides his mom and his sister, and getting to sleep in whenever he wanted, and having his mom make him waffles every morning-after-full-moon-night plus a bunch of other times every month just because...well. No. He doesn't miss anything besides that about life before coming to Lima. The other things that are definitely out there to miss didn't really happen in the Akron Valley, not if you didn't want to give Sue's wolves a reason to come after you. He can't miss not being afraid of Sue. Puck was born with claws on his hands and the moon wired to his spine. He's been afraid of Sue Sylvester his whole life.

He maybe misses being able to pretend not to care as much. And going out running for three days on end without telling anyone. And not having to wonder, way far back in the human part of his brain how much the uncollared bitches he sometimes meets on an out-of-town pass see the Chief's mark around his neck and think they have to.

But that was why he gave himself almost eighteen years out there, to make sure willingly putting a chain made of iron and silver around his neck wasn't as crazy as it sounded. That and the fact that it took his mom eighteen years to get tired of lying about where he was on full moon nights and throw him out to hunt, scrape, or get dragged before Sue on his own. But mostly the first thing.

 

~~~

 

The Ohio Territory troop is not a pack. That's important to remember. Wild animals have packs. Soldiers have troops.

Monkeys have troops as well, but that's almost fitting. A troop is a gathering of hairy animals that, if you squint in bad light, almost look human. Quinn doesn't think Sue made a mistake there.

It's not a pack. They patrol the forty mile radius around Lima every night, they don't roam across it. The only dominance hierarchy is the one Sue lays down, and hers is the only word anyone needs. It's not a family. They don't form mating bonds. They don't raise pups. They only hunt other wolves.

It's a job. It's a job that legitimized Quinn's existence near real people for long enough that she almost forgot she wasn't one. She blames Finn for that.

Finn Hudson came up to Lima out of nowhere seven months and eight full moons before Quinn was first promoted to Team Leader. He congratulated her. She remembers that.

Finn was bumbling. After being surrounded all day by inhuman grace and the occasional awkward steps of someone too used to their joints moving altogether differently, it was somehow sweet just to watch a piece of honest human clumsiness. Finn was sweet. Finn was honest. Finn was human.

Finn got so utterly befuddled by directions one night when they were out walking and he got turned around in the dark that Quinn nearly died laughing. He didn't mind being laughed at, even though she never told him he was the first thing to make her laugh in longer than she could remember. She'd forgotten he couldn't see in the dark. Nearly everybody who looked at her eyes instead of her neck while they were talking to her could see in the dark just fine.

There aren't very many wolf packs left in the Ohio Territory any more, but Quinn knows they exist. It's her business to know how wild wolves live. The ones from Ohio have mostly picked up and moved west, to Sonora and Sierra Territories, where they say packs sometimes run a hundred strong. Acadia's thick with them, torn with territorial disputes because there are nearly too many wolves just to fit on the land. It's hard to imagine.

There are werewolves out there that stick as close as family, no matter what--closer, then, than Quinn's human family. They run down deer and elk side-by-side and mate for life and raise pups in the dirt to become more grown-up werewolves who will never leave their pack, who will live their whole lives in raw meat and dog slobber, just like their parents, and their parents, and their parents before them. And something like that might be the closest to love that Quinn's ever going to have, now, because Finn Hudson is too human and too clean for her to ever be allowed to touch.

She was a human little girl, once. She used to fall asleep in her daddy's lap, clutching his shirt tight with her opposable thumbs. She had dreams about a husband, about a yellow house with shining wood floors and fluttering white curtains in every window. She used to play with baby dolls. She'd put them in little dresses and rock them in their cradles and think about what she wanted to name her children when she grew up, back when she'd thought they'd be human, too.

Finn reminded her of all of it. He rented a room in a boarding house six blocks west of the main Sheriff's station, the kind with a plump landlady who sets out breakfast every morning because Finn eats like a horse and can't cook anything that isn't over an open campfire to save his life. The landlady hung curtains in the drab little window, cream-colored lace that fluttered in the breeze while Quinn lay on her back in Finn's bed, face-to-face, like people do. She'd bury her nose in his neck while he shuddered and tried to last, smelling the healthy sour tang of a young man at the peak of exertion, and he would move in her, and she would let herself forget.

 

~~~

 

Brittany is doing a backbend on the very tips of her fingers and toes. The stretch is strange in her muscles, strange in her joints, but good-strange, tingling like the opposite of early moonlight.

Everything Brittany's body does makes sense. Her paws are for running and her tail is for balancing and her jaws are for lunging and snapping and biting. She doesn't think about it any more than Santana says people think about their human bodies, although Brittany finds that so hard to believe. There are so many joints that bend in so many ways. When Brittany's human she can be as upside-down as she is inside-out.

Her body can latch onto a rhythm and sail across it for a while, scratch at her side a quick staccato, lope across an empty yard an even brum-brum-brum. Her human body can latch onto a rhythm and dance.

Santana misses being human sometimes. It's not something she says on purpose, not in the droop of her tail or the way she holds her head or even in words, but Brittany knows. She's not sure why--human things are confusing, too many sentences and not enough making sense, too many rules that don't even apply to Brittany, too many special rules that do. She follows them when she can, except for one time, but Santana promised that was okay too. Santana still understands people even though her body talks like Brittany's now. She takes Brittany out into town and introduces her around, and they meet people who remind Brittany how humans can talk with their skin and their muscles and their cries too, once a werewolf gets rid of all the clothes and starts another kind of dance.

Santana is coming down the corridor, so Brittany pushes up with her legs and rolls forward onto two feet. Santana's happy-not happy today, Brittany can feel it hanging in the air even before she comes in the door.

Brittany frowns. Sometimes she forgets how many face muscles she sometimes has, especially right after a moon, but she's been mostly human for the past couple of weeks. "What's wrong?" she asks. "Did Quinn leave?"

"Yeah," says Santana. She drops backwards onto the nest of pillows Brittany uses as a bed whenever she doesn't feel like dealing with blankets. "I've really got to step up my game, though. Chief is pissed we didn't figure it out about Quinn and Hudson earlier."

"We didn't figure it out at all," Brittany says, and Santana glares.

"Yeah, and Chief never finds out about that, all right? Anyway, if I can just keep it together and show her what I've got for the next couple of weeks, that Team Leader slot is mine."

"You'll get it, Santana," Brittany assures her. "You'd be really good at it, and Chief totally knows how much you want it."

"Yeah, and that's why she thinks she can just leave me hanging like this. Ugh!" Santana's head flops back in frustration.

"Are you going to miss Quinn?" Brittany asks. There's space on her pile of pillows next to Santana, so she sits down, close. Snuggling isn't quite the same when there's no fur involved, but sometimes it's better.

"No," Santana scoffs. "Listen, Brittany, that bitch betrayed us. She was walking around trying to pretend like she was better than everyone here, all right, trying to pretend like she was human. Probably trying to convince herself that someday she and Hudson were going to go back to his hometown and raise ugly bastard half-breed babies together."

"Puck's a half-breed," Brittany points out. Santana snorts.

"Yeah, and Puck's an ugly bastard," she says, but her shoulders have relaxed and she doesn't sound like she means it anymore. "So," says Santana, putting an arm around Brittany's shoulders. "What do you want to do for the full moon?"

 

~~~

 

Finn had never actually had a best friend before Puck. It was surprisingly awesome.

The whole 'departmental liaison'-ing thing sounded pretty cool in theory or when he wrote to his mom about it, but mostly it just means a whole lot of paperwork. Usually when the werewolf troop goes out, it's to put down a pack that's started killing people or a tame wolf who's gone feral. There's not a lot for the sheriff's department to do with that kind of thing. It's not even technically against the law, since Ohio doesn't really have any laws that apply to werewolves. That's what they have Sue Sylvester for.

Finn gets called in when there's some kind of theft and there's property to be returned, or some humans have gotten involved and made things an even bigger mess than they would've been otherwise. There was a guy down in Cuyahoga who was raising three pups in his basement and training them to kill his neighbors' livestock at the full moon. Then one of the pups bit one of the neighbors, and it turned into a whole thing about endangerment charges and liability. The other two pups got out past the territory borders somewhere, Finn's pretty sure. He's kind of gladder than he should be. They were cute.

Anyway, Finn figures his real job in the sheriff's office is to be the guy who doesn't just go 'shoot all wolves that don't have collars on sight'. Puck's job is to be the dog who sniffs around by himself and figures out which wolf they're supposed to shoot.

Puck's been on a bunch of different teams within the wolf troop while Finn's known him, but it never seems to stick--he works best, he told Finn, leaning in conspiratorially, as a free agent. It totally makes sense: Puck just sort of roams around getting women to fall all over him with his dangerous-charming-barely-leashed-animal mystery aura thing, and then they give him information, and then Finn gets to go back to the office and take credit for figuring out who's been harboring the stray that comes around every few months and tears up Mr. and Mrs. Potter's chickens.

Most of the other werewolves are cool and all, but they're not really good at being around people. Even Quinn gets really intense sometimes. And he liked it, liked her, even when she was kind of scary, but the point is, Puck's not like that. Puck's just cool.

Finn's still not really sure why Puck picked him to hang out with. It just sort of happened, and then a few weeks, seventeen rounds of tequila shots, and half a dozen hangovers later, they were buddies.

He tried asking once. "So, don't most werewolves, like, usually like to hang out with other wolves? You know, when there's werewolves around, not, like, the ones out in the middle of nowhere who don't know anybody else and never go out at night and everything." He sort of trailed off at the end there because Puck was giving him that look that made him think maybe he'd put his foot in his mouth again, but then Puck threw an arm around his shoulder and pushed open the door to the Pour House down on Sawyer street--they'd gotten kicked out of McStaggers the week before for generally rowdy behavior--with the other hand.

"I," Puck said, "am a stud in every body, my friend, and it is only right to share my studliness with the human population as well as my werewolf brothers and sisters. Also, there's a two drink limit on werewolves, so, you're buying."

They'd gotten along, though. They kinda understood each other. Puck's dad hadn't been around while he was growing up, either. Of course, that's because Puck's dad was off being a totally wild werewolf that Finn was secretly k still ind of worried was gonna get dragged in before Chief Sylvester one of these days even though he was probably half way to Queen-of-Angels by now, and not because he died a national hero or anything, but still. He'd never been there to teach Puck to ride a bike either.

He'd even let Finn tag along on some of his adventures, when they were close enough to some village that Finn could justify it to his boss, and he'd totally saved Finn's life that one time the truck broke down just north of Allegheny and they ran into that bear. Puck was awesome. He had, like, eight million good ideas, and he was always letting Finn take the credit for stuff just 'cause it was easier that way. They got drunk together and talked about girls. Wasn't that what best friends are like?

 

~~~

 

Puck hangs around the kennel until after dinner--there's an ongoing prank war between Strando's team and Cooper's team, and some of the bitches have set up a betting pool that he'd totally be getting in on if he had more time. Then he strips off his uniform and steps out into the moonlight.

Partial moon nights never have the same rush. There's totally enough of it--it's a clear night and the moon's only a few days before full--but for Puck it's just creeping up on the edge of being work to pull his fur on over himself instead of just letting it explode at will. Anybody who's endured Sue Sylvester's style of training had better be ready to shift into paws and claws no matter when or where it is, but how far a werewolf can easily stretch whatever moonlight they manage to soak up mostly depends on the wolf. He's seen Becky take wolf-shape at the new moon in the middle of the day. Puck, he's too comfortable with the too many human things, the game of how much charm or slyness he can put into his voice at once, to go easy stripping away his vocal cords too often. But just this much is a piece of steak.

She's only about eight miles out of town, which means she has to have stopped at least once or twice. Crappy winding human road and rough terrain or not, the Quinn he knows is faster than this. She's also a hell of a lot smarter.

You don't get killed, in Ohio Territory, just for being a wolf. You get killed for being a dangerous wolf, which means causing damage to anyone or anything human, conspiratorial plotting against the state, or running around free on the full moon where the troop can see you. Sylvester didn't have Quinn executed right out, but that's not going to stop anyone from dragging her back if they run into her less than forty miles from Lima on Tuesday.

She doesn't stop walking even when he bounds out of the undergrowth in front of her and shakes the fur off his back. She's dull-eyed, exhausted.

"Are you here to kill me, or do I have at few more hours to stagger my way out into the wilderness?" Quinn asks with flat sarcasm.

"Hey, I'm trying to help," Puck protests. Every fucking time, she always gets his back up, the second she opens her mouth.

"Well, don't," Quinn snaps, shrugging off the hand he'd automatically reached out to grab her shoulder. "Jesus, Puck, put some clothes on. Where's your uniform?"

"Left it," he says. "I'm coming with you."

That stops her. She actually turns to look at him, and Quinn's usually too good to meet anyone's eyes if they're too yellow. She stares at him incredulous, reading casual sincerity in every inch of his open, slouching posture. Puck waits to see if she's going to burst into tears or kick him in the balls first.

"You can't be serious," Quinn says.

"Why not?" he asks. "Because I can't love you? I mean sure, no offense, you kinda put the 'witch' in 'bitch', but I'm still here."

"We had sex one time," she says. "One time, and it was the day after the full moon. We aren't anything. We were never anything, and we were never going to be anything, all right?"

"Why, because of Finn?" Puck snorts sarcastically. "Finn was never going to be the one who could keep up with you and you know it."

"Why, because he's a human?" Quinn snaps.

"Yeah, and he's an idiot," Puck says, with no real judgment. Finn's still probably his best friend, he is. They even have the same taste in girls. The only difference is, Puck knows what she needs in ways Finn never, ever will. "I mean, I love the guy, but he was never going to get it. He was never going to get you. He is never gonna know what you and I both do, because he's never gonna be like us."

"Maybe I don't want to fuck an animal," Quinn says, but she's shaking a little. She lets him put his hand on her shoulder this time.

"Doesn't matter whether or not he's an animal, Finn's nice," says Puck. "Us, we're killers. If Finn were a werewolf he'd be so tame he'd play fetch."

"We're tame," Quinn says. "We're not wild animals."

"No," says Puck. "You were never meant to be a domesticated little lapdog that curls up in a cage every full moon and never learns to run. Admit it. You already miss those knives, and secretly you're terrified that if you don't get far enough away you're going to tear right through some village on the full moon and you won't even care."

"I'll care, Puck," Quinn snaps, drawing back half a pace. "Because that's what people do, they care about things like that."

"But we're not people, Quinn, we're werewolves, remember?" he says. "You can't tell me you haven't ripped out at least as many throats as most of the wolves we've dragged in here. The only difference is, you do it when Sue tells you to, and they just do it."

"I should've known you'd admire them," she scoffs, turning away. "Is that why you told Sue about me and Finn?"

"Hey, that was Santana," Puck defends.

"And who told Santana?" Quinn asks, sweet as little crystals of poison.

"That was an accident." Maybe not as much of an accident as it should have been, for something that sort of threw his best friend and the girl he's in love with under the bus, but they're going to be better off without each other anyway.

Puck doesn't let himself think about how much he's going to miss Finn. He's kind of nice and he's kind of dumb and he's human from the top of his sky-scraping head right on down. Maybe he and Puck could have been friends their whole lives, in some other lives, but Puck's not a pet and when it comes down to it, with Finn that's all he could ever really be.

"Everything you screw up is an accident, Puck." Quinn turns away from him and continues on down the road. Puck stands and stares, though it's way too dark for any human to see, watching the tiny little skirt on her dress brushing around her thighs.

"Are you coming or not?" she adds over her shoulder. "Sue will kill you even faster than me once she realizes you quit without waiting to get thrown out first."

He has to jog a few paces to catch up.

 

~~~

 

Santana's about 90% certain that Sue Sylvester knows how she became a werewolf. She pretends to believe the official story, the one Santana gave her with the biggest eyes she could muster when she was fifteen years old, but Santana's just waiting for the day she pulls out the real one because it suits her. And Santana won't--can't--let that happen.

So she stays on Chief Sylvester's good side, and she makes sure Brittany does, too. It's a constant challenge, since Chief Sylvester's moods seem to change shape even more often than her werewolves do, but it's worth it.

Santana doesn't know what Quinn was always moaning about. They have it good in the wolf troop. People notice them, and it's not to throw sticks or run for their shotguns. People get out of their way on the sidewalk. They always get super-fast service when they go to a bar or a restaurant, and human guys are scared enough that they'll do pretty much anything she or Brittany tell them to. They have the wind and the moon and the smell of dust after rain, and Santana knows Quinn loves the hunt just as much as anybody. But Quinn would prance along at the head of the team like the most perfect little wolf who ever lived, and then get back to the kennel and just sit there and whine about how she wanted something different. Santana seriously does not see what the big deal about not being people is. People suck.

So what if Quinn used to braid Brittany's hair or give Santana advice on clothing when she remembered she had to own some, in between boning that excruciatingly dull stick of man-meat. So what if Puck was, like, obsessed with her. Santana wasn't jealous, and she's not guilty. She did her job. Chief is happy, Brittany's safe, and Santana's one step closer to getting made Team Leader. Everything's good here.

It's not about right and wrong. Right and wrong don't apply, not really, not for werewolves and the rules that get thrown their way.

After all, the way the rules see it, the worst thing Brittany's ever done in her life isn't any of the other werewolves she's killed, or even those people who got in their way when they were taking down that werewolf fight club gambling ring, the one Puck seemed to know way too well. They both got scratches behind the ears for that, and shiny bonuses the next day while they were still picking human skin out of their teeth. No, according to Sue's rules, the worst thing Britt's ever done Santana had to outright beg her for, and she only agreed because Santana promised they'd never, ever get caught.

Santana'd get somebody to rip out her own throat before she ever went back to being a human, seriously, she means it. Like hell she wouldn't tear out Quinn's if it kept her and Brittany at the top of the troop heap. Not when Quinn didn't even want to be here. Santana fixed that little problem for her.

She seriously does not get what Puck sees in her. Puck's like Santana, born for this life, even if it took her a decade and a half to get to it. Puck's way more perceptive than he should be. He gets the way some things are more like pack than Sue Sylvester ever wanted, how Santana would've been willing to kill for Brittany even in the days where that would've been murder. He gets the language of tongue on tongue and skin on skin and even fur on fur. Santana tries to picture Perfect Miss Quinn ever getting down and doin' the dirty in wolf-body, and can't begin to imagine it.

Puck will link arms with Santana sometimes when they both have a night off and the moon hangs a sliver in the sky, and walk through the streets of Lima just to watch the humans awkwardly refuse to meet their eyes. It's fucking hilarious. Puck agrees, Puck gets that, Puck's scored them more free dinners with a rumbling growl from the back of his throat at just the right time than this town has waiters. Sometimes it feels like Puck's the only one who gets it. She loves Brittany, but she's so wolf Santana's not even sure she pays attention to the human assholes all around them. Puck understands how to play.

So yeah, he told her about his little affair with Blondie McPrissypants, and he told her about the whole, tragic mess between her and that human drink ticket he somehow calls a friend. And Santana did him a favor, because friends do shit like that for each other, and told Hudson and the Chief all about it. So now Puck's out two problems.

They were supposed to be on call tonight, but Chief pulled them until she could name another Team Leader. So now Santana gets to lounge against a rock in the rec yard and watch Brittany do perfect backbends, one after another, bathed in moonlight.

 

~~~

 

And the thing is.

Look, the thing is, Finn's not really the smartest guy in the world. Maybe he's a little too naive. Maybe he's a little too trusting. In McKinley everyone really was genuinely good-hearted and always trying to look out for their neighbors (the alternative, that maybe they actually weren't and he just never, ever noticed occurs to him suddenly, and he has to push down extra hard on the accelerator to outrun it). And in Lima, he always had Puck around for that.

A smarter, less naive kind of guy might have figured that Puck was going to end up being the one betraying him, but that's just not the kind of guy Finn is. Maybe it makes him a chump, and it definitely made him kick over a chair at the boarding house when he finally figured out just how well he got played, but Finn believes in friendship and stuff.

Friends don't sleep with each other's girls. Friends especially don't sleep with each other's girls and then lie about it, and then tell everybody else they know so they can laugh at the stupid human jerk who thought he was good enough to fall in love with someone like Quinn.

And girlfriends don't sleep with their boyfriends' best friends. If they were girlfriend and boyfriend. The problem with Quinn has always been that she's just impossible to figure out sometimes. Finn just wishes he didn't love her for it so much.

They've known each other for five years and they didn't do anything more than talk for the first three. Finn was still just a gangly teenager fresh in from the countryside when he met her. She was more beautiful than any girl he'd ever seen.

There are things he knows about Quinn: how to make her laugh, when to shut up and do what she tells him, how to brush her hair back and kiss her just right to make her smile after a bad day she would never give him the details of. He knows that she wears vanilla perfume when she has a day off, but when she comes to see him sometimes she smells kind of like blood, until she washes up in his bathroom and puts on one of his shirts and comes back just smelling like him. He knows she likes some kind of foreign food he can't even pronounce from that Scythian place on Rose Street. He knows that when she curls up close to him, she feels soft and almost tiny, like he could just fold in around her and protect her from everything in the world.

Finn doesn't know when she started sleeping with Puck--Santana didn't tell him, and he didn't think to ask in the middle of the shouting argument he and Quinn finally had, right in the middle of Pepper Street, just down the block and around the corner from the kennel. He doesn't know why he wasn't enough for her. He doesn't know much of anything, really.

He knows Sylvester threw her out because his own boss made a point of saying so, but he doesn't know where she is now. Then again, Finn doesn't exactly know where he is right now, either. He knows the roads around Lima well enough not to be quite lost, entirely, but it's a dark night and trees aren't exactly signposts for him like they are for other people. Or not-people, in this case.

He's pretty sure he's going south-west, at this point; he started off east and then circled around back once he got farther than she'd ever manage going along the road on foot. Quinn might be heading off through the trees like a wolf, but Finn doesn't think so. She likes her stuff too much to leave it all behind.

The shotgun rattles against the floorboards as Finn hits a dip in the road. He's scanning the tree line way too hard to keep an eye out for potholes. He'll probably have to check the suspension, later.

The headlights catch on a pair of tall shadows and a glint of metal on the far side of the road. Finn's teeth involuntarily clench; if he were a werewolf, he'd growl. Of course he'd be with her.

He swings the truck over left, completely blocking the empty oncoming lane, and slams the breaks on right in front of the place where the shadows had ducked between trees. The click of the door opening is louder than he remembers.

Finn really wishes he wasn't just now realizing that he has no idea how this is supposed to go.

 

~~~

 

It's the second time tonight a guy who thinks he's in love with her has surged up out of the darkness, most likely to kill her, and Quinn is too tired to be surprised at anything anymore. The headlights are too bright and if Finn shoots her now at least it'll all be over. She won't have to decide what to do next.

"Hey, uh..." Finn steps out of the truck, uncertain and night-blind, holding a shotgun in one hand. Quinn is still frozen between staying to watch and melting away into the woods forever when he spots them, across the hood of the truck, just past the edge of the beam of the headlights.

"Come on, Quinn," Puck says from behind her, not bothering to lower his voice. "Let's get out of here."

"You're never going to get far enough away before the full moon on foot," Finn says, and he's right. They've got two more days of walking at human speed with no food and no water, and even if they abandon everything now Quinn doesn't know where they'd go to ever get any of it back again.

"Then we'll ditch the stuff and run. Come on, Quinn," says Puck.

"We don't exactly have a lot of options," Quinn says, very carefully.

"Get in the truck," says Finn. Their aura of astonishment must be obvious even to human perceptions, because he sighs and adds, "I'm not going to let them hunt you down and kill you just because I'm pissed you lied to me. Either of you."

"Why the hell should we trust you?" Puck says, taking one step forward, now looming over Quinn's shoulder almost close enough to touch.

"Because that's what friends do," says Finn. "Even when they're angry. They quit their jobs and destroy their whole lives and go find their other friends in the middle of the woods with nothing but a bunch of spare bullets and a couple of pairs of socks."

Quinn laughs, because it's either that or cry, and says, "You're better than Puck, at least. Neither of you are borrowing my tooth brush," more strain in her voice than she'd like to show.

"We don't need you, Hudson," Puck says, but low and cautious, and not at all like he's saying no.

"Yeah, what are you going to do, just keep walking and hope wherever you end up they won't run you out of town just for being there?" Finn asks. "I know some people who can help."

"You?" Quinn asks, incredulous, because if there's a poster for 'secret underground werewolf conspirator'--well, maybe it would be the guy with wolves for a girlfriend and a best friend, but still, it wouldn't be Finn Hudson. He's too honest to conspire over anything.

"My stepbrother's a wolf, back in McKinley. Our old teacher--there's places. Places you're not going to get to on foot," he adds, with a way-too-earnest look for both of them.

"Fine," says Quinn. So maybe she's making the decision for all of them, but she never asked Finn or Puck to ruin their lives over her. Her back hurts and her arms hurt and her feet hurt, and is it so wrong to just want to sit down and let somebody else drive for a while?

"Fine," Puck agrees, stepping up to the truck. "Hey, give me your knife. It's steel, right?"

"Why?" Finn asks, clearly suspicious. Quinn would be wary too, even though Puck doesn't need a weapon to kill someone even in his human form.

"If we're going off to find, like, domesticated werewolf utopia or whatever, I'm not wearing this thing the whole way," he says, jerking his chin at his collar. "So give me your knife so I can cut it off."

"Wait, that collar's magic," Quinn objects, even though Finn's already handing his belt knife over the hood of the car. "You can't just--"

"It's still just made out of metal," Puck says, easing the tip of the knife between the links of chain and his skin. "It's not even a metal that's good for anything, just some dumb soft gold and silver alloy."

"Electrum," says Quinn quietly. This whole thing seems incredibly dangerous--for one thing, Quinn's pretty sure nobody in their right minds would trust Puck with something that sharp that close to his own throat, even if it is only steel--and so equally stupid and brave that she doesn't dare say any more. "Naturally-occurring alloy with excellent conductive properties for both electricity and magic. Almost as dangerous to werewolves as pure silver."

"Dude, are you sure you know what you're doing?" Finn asks, but there's a sound like something popping, and the sides of the collar starting to pull free.

"Yeah, this might just take a little while," says Puck. "And you're seriously gonna want to sharpen your knife after this."

"Finn," Quinn says, to change the subject more than anything, "did you bring any spare clothes with you? Because I've been dealing with him naked for four hours and if I have to sit next to him on a car ride like that for too long..."

"Um...I think I've got a horse blanket in back," Finn offers. Puck groans.

"Seriously, dude? That is so not cool."

"You're the one who ran off without bringing any clothes with you," Quinn points out.

"Um, because I was trying to catch up to you before anybody else did?"

"And you're kinda ruining my knife," Finn adds.

"Hey, it's a symbolic gesture of Sue Sylvester can kiss my ass and can't use this thing to track us with her creepy magic powers," Puck grumbles. "What is this, pick on Puck night?"

"You do make it kind of easy," Finn says, and Quinn is startled to realize that she's smiling.

There's a light *plink* from Puck's direction, then a sigh. "Done. Gimmie the damn horse blanket and let's get this show on the road already."

It's a tight squeeze along the bench seat of the cab; Quinn's slim but not tiny, and Finn and Puck are both fairly large. It's almost cozy. It's almost safe. It isn't really either.

The long night road stretches on and on beyond the headlights.

 

~~~

 

Brittany trots into the Chief's office on light, quick paws. The morning after the full moon is bury-your-face-under-your-tail-and-sleep time, but by the afternoon she's always starving, and after that she's awake. It usually takes a day or two before she feels like spending her free time in her human body again, too. It's good to be able to wag her tail and bristle her fur with her moods, to yip and growl and bound places on all four feet when she feels like it. After a couple of days she starts to miss having hands.

Santana's already there, and human, standing across from the Chief, who gives Brittany the hand motion to stand up. It feels like a new suit of clothing settling over the top of her, stretching up into human-ness. It's comfortable and it fits and all, but it's not the same as just being naked.

Probably that's just because of the uniform coming back from wherever Chief Sylvester's made it magically go away when she changes. Brittany's not really sure how she feels about the whole idea of metaphors. Things probably ought to just get called what they are all the time, but human language doesn't work that way.

"Well I see you've managed to last a whole four days without a team leader to rescue you from your own incompetence," says the Chief. "Tell me, do you know what this is?" she adds, and holds a familiar leather harness up by one finger.

"That's the team leader's knives," Santana says quickly. If she were a wolf she'd be straining forward with only her feet keeping her in place, Brittany thinks, but in a human body she just sounds like she really wants Chief to be happy with her.

"Very good. Now, can either of you tell me what this is?" she continues, picking up something slithery and metal from the desk.

"It's a collar," Brittany answers obediently, since Santana's still looking at it and she took her turn last time.

"That's Puckerman's," Santana says, making Brittany look closer. It smells sort of like Puck, but also like woods and dirt and everyone on Traci's team, but the patterns look sort of right. Santana's always been better at recognizing things like that.

"Wait, how would Puck's collar get broken?" Brittany asks. It can't be Chief Sylvester, because Puck doesn't sleep with any humans more than once and she'd take his collar off in front of everybody like Quinn's if she kicked him out. Santana looks really worried all of the sudden.

"Well, that's what you two are going to find out, Brittany," says Chief Sylvester, in the happy voice that comes with the very angry body language. "I'm sure you'll find that this is nothing more than an accident and an unfortunate coincidence, and our misplaced little cub is even now no doubt sleeping off some unauthorized full moon bender that left him too staggeringly incapacitated to notice his collar mysteriously falling off, and we can all just stop worrying. Of course if it is somehow related to your tramp of a former team leader and that grotesquely oversized man-child the Ohio Sheriff's Department calls a deputy...I expect you'll act accordingly."

The thing about the Chief is that she uses a lot of words, especially if she's angry, but you don't need to follow all of them to know what she means. Puck leaving is about Quinn, and the Chief never gets this kind of angry unless she wants somebody dead.

"What's accordingly?" asks Santana, who has to have worked out the same thing as Brittany, and wants the Chief to take it back. Brittany doesn't want to kill Quinn. Or Puck. She just wants to say no to the Chief a lot less.

Chief Sylvester sits back in her chair and fixes them both with the look that means she's going to start telling one of her stories. "You know, when I was temporarily assigned with the Macedonian Foreign Legion, and my regiment got stranded thirty miles from the Arctic Circle with nothing but three mules and half a day's worth of supplies, most people would have seen the desertion of almost the entire regiment and the threat of an oncoming blizzard as a problem, but one, extremely talented, young officer saw it as an opportunity. And do you know that officer's name?"

"Sue Sylvester?" Brittany guesses. It's always Sue Sylvester.

Chief nods and leans forward across her desk, and says, with great intensity, "Sue Sylvester."

Then she leans back again and says, "And that's how the Empire came to conquer the province of Greenland."

"Wait, I thought that was Admiral Peary, like, a hundred years ago," Santana says, confused.

"No, that was me," says the Chief. "This is an opportunity. I want to know where they're headed. Not even Don Juan Fido is stupid enough to go off without some kind of plan. You're going to follow them, and you're going to find them, and then when you do, you're going to join them."

"Wait, I thought you wanted us to kill--" Santana starts, but then cuts off as the Chief raises a finger.

"If I wanted you to kill, I'd say 'kill'," the Chief says pleasantly. "I just want you to watch. I want you to watch, I want you to send word back to me about whatever cozy little wild forested yonder werewolf hideaway they find, and if they step out of line, I want you to send for a team and crush the living daylights out of them." She smiles broadly. "If you do it right, I'll make you Team Leader!"

"What if they figure out we're spying on them first?" Santana asks, and Brittany looks over with her eyes without moving her head because Santana sounds way nervous. Brittany wants to see Quinn and Puck again, but she really hopes they won't do anything wrong, because wanting to see them isn't the same as wanting to kill them, no matter what Chief Sylvester orders.

"Well then, either I'll get rid of two troublesome deserters, or I'm out a pair of she-wolves who can't even carry out a simple set of orders," Chief says happily. "I'd say that's pretty good for me either way, wouldn't you?"

"All right," says Santana, and Brittany nods. She knows the Team Leader position isn't really being offered to her, but it's Santana, and somebody needs to be there to back her up. Wolves on their own are just sad. Santana's always been the other half of Brittany's pack, even when she was human. Neither of them's any good alone.

"Good," says the Chief, getting up from her desk. "Now. One last thing." Brittany and Santana exchange glances. "We're going to have to get those collars off of you. Can't have you looking like you're still loyal, right?"

The thing about humans is, sometimes a smile is the scariest expression they can have.


	2. Music of the Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Werewolf night school is the place you go when you've got nowhere else to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from Music of the Night from Phantom of the Opera, by Andrew Lloyd Webber, which can be found [here](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imv-7F8zHy4). (The song Rachel sings is [here](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYRLBL5938M)). All place names taken from real towns and counties in Ohio, although any actual resemblance is coincidental.

Will Schuester's great-Aunt Lillian died when he was 20 years old. He had to hitchhike home from school in Lima to get to the funeral--he nearly missed it, too, when the driver taking him from Salem to Bluffton got stuck in the mud by the river. He wouldn't have made a dent in the crowd. Half the district came out to see her buried; well, she'd taught almost all of them, at one point or another.

Will was the one she left her house to, though. After that he had to come back and teach in Auglaize. He'd grown up in Bluffton and McKinley. The love of his very young life was selling bolts of cloth and ladies' hats in a shop in Elida. The moment when he stepped off the farm cart bringing him into Bluffton for the last time, once again spattered in mud--this time from helping when a mail truck sprang a flat thirty miles out of Delphos--the whole promising world seemed to settle into place around him.

Great-Aunt Lillian's house was eleven miles down the road from Elida, the first eight of those dirt, and even farther from anywhere else. It had been left empty for over a year while Will finished his degree and negotiated his way into the rotation of teachers through the one-room school houses of Auglaize district. There was an old, creaky water wheel and an old pump that badly needed repairing, half a dozen broken windows, and a forest bent on creeping in to all the cleared area that had long been denied it. Will fixed almost every rusty pipe and rotted floorboard himself before Terri would agree to move in there with him.

It's always been a teacher's house, and not only because Will can't afford anything closer into town on what they pay him. It's just about the same amount of inconveniently far from everything; it might be more than ten miles to go to teach reading and writing in the Elida schoolhouse on Wednesdays and Saturdays, but it's also only thirteen miles instead of twenty-five to do the same in Delphos on Monday and Thursday. Terri could have her sewing room and they'd still have plenty of room to, someday, fill the house with children.

Neither of them had really been expecting what kind of children he'd end up bringing home with him, but it wasn't like Will could just throw them back out into the night after Rachel Berry's fathers had invited them in. Deep down, he still can't completely blame Terri for leaving him over it.

 

~~~

 

Someday, Rachel Berry is going to live in a place with better-than-substandard lighting. She suspects that once she finally gets to New York City, that problem might take care of itself--of course she'll have to move into an actual constructed house and not a cave at all, although she's no longer sure whether that's something to aspire to. Caves, after all, come cheaply and pre-built, often with their own supply of water, may have many different entrances and exits, are terribly difficult to navigate if you're unfamiliar with them or can't see in the dark, and are next to impossible to burn. Also, and much more importantly, they have _great_ acoustics.

Acoustics are important. How else could she put on impromptu welcome concerts every time another lone wolf or small family pack passes through the area? Nobody new has arrived in the district since last fall, but Kurt and Mercedes come by all the time, and anyway there's always her fathers. Familiarity is hardly a reason to get complacent, after all. She has to practice so she'll sound her very best at Mr. Schue's this week. She and Tina are teaching some of the young ones about pitch and tone.

" _Flowers fade, the fruits of summer fade, they have their seasons, so do we,_ " Rachel sings, and her voice reverberates pleasingly off the high stone roof of the sitting room. " _But just promise me that sometimes, you will think of me!_ " She holds the last note for just a few beats before cutting it off cleanly rather than letting it taper away into silence, an artistic decision she feels lends more weight to the power of the song. She's sure Mr. Schuester will agree with her on Saturday night. In the moment of silence-just-before-the-applause that every true performer lives for, she can hear a trickle of crumbling sand dislodge itself from the ceiling and patter softly against the cheesecloth canopy tacked up over the ceiling.

Her fathers clap enthusiastically. Kurt and Mercedes join in--and she can _tell_ the difference in exuberance, Kurt Hummel--a moment later.

"Bravo, honey, bravo," says Daddy H. "Couldn't be sung better on Broad Avenue."

"I've got no critiques, honey," Mercedes says frankly. "You knocked that one dead."

"Kurt?" Rachel prompts a moment later. He rests one elbow on his other hand and tilts his head at her, considering.

"You rushed the tempo a little coming out of the bridge," he says.

"I was trying to signify the growing intensity of the song!" she protests, because really Kurt, there's helpful and then there's just jealously nitpicky, but he just nods.

"Yes, well, it came off as rushed. Don't tell me _the_ Rachel Berry can't show intensity without speeding up," he says. Then he smiles. "Other than that, it was brilliant. No critiques."

"Oh! Well, yes, thank you," says Rachel. Sometimes just being around Kurt can be a bit much, but he's still her harshest--some days, her only _useful_ critic, and his praise can leave her a little flustered.

"Well, this has been lovely," Kurt says, standing and carefully brushing off his trousers even though the fur-covered cushions they're using in place of a couch are perfectly clean, thank you very much, "but if Mercedes and I want to make it through the woods before any eager farmers start taking predawn potshots at shadows in the woods, we should get going. Rachel, we'll see you at Schue's this weekend?"

"Be careful out there," says Daddy L. "Moon on Tuesday."

Rachel shudders dramatically. Moon on Tuesday means guns on Monday and fire on Wednesday. Really, she doesn't know how they've survived here this long.

"We'll be fine," Mercedes promises, slipping out of the dress she always leaves at Rachel's for nights like this. Kurt's already halfway out of the cave and behind a wall of stalagmites--he hates to be human naked in front of anyone, even them. She'll find his clothes neatly folded on a small, dry pedestal of rock after they go.

Rachel walks out to the mouth of the cave just to see them safely off, two lithe, low shadows springing out into the night.

 

~~~

 

Kurt can sing the entire score to every operetta his mother ever knew by heart, but it doesn't sound right without the harmony.

His mother could never hear music like he can. She'd put the record player on and sit in her purple armchair and set her sewing basket carefully to the side to hold him on her lap with her eyes closed while she sang along, stroking his hair like she would a pet dog or her actual human son. She only heard notes, though, sung or played one at a time, and Kurt knows because she told him to close his eyes and listen for them, too. The first time he heard music as a wolf, he almost lost his mind.

The thing about notes is that there's never just one. The thing about sound is that it ripples out from its center in so many more dimensions than just 'high' or 'low'. The few beats of an operetta played on his mother's scratchy old record player expand into whole overwhelming clouds of sound, too much to piece through, enough to drown in if you tried. And then, because it's music, it just keeps coming, throwing forth harmonies so intricate and full of infinite depth that humans couldn't ever hear them or they'd stop making music ever again.

The first time Kurt heard music as a wolf was two days after the full moon that fell on his seventh birthday, when his mother let him practice changing indoors and away from the cage in the attic, just this once. She let him down on the floor of the sitting room, cautiously, with his father guarding the door to the foyer, to sniff and nose his way around such a little space he already knew so well when he could see it right. Then the full orchestral might of the overture to _Christina and the Ghost_ shattered through his senses and destroyed any sense of where he was, what he was doing, anything but the impossible labyrinth of sound.

His mother pulled her hand away fast enough that he didn't actually snap it off when she reached out to try and comfort him. Burt Hummel didn't need two werewolves in his life.

Kurt thought to regret it a year and a half later. Wolves don't slip and fall patching slick roofs after rain while their husbands are in another city learning about new engine innovations in tractors and grain threshers. If they do, they walk away from the three-story drop with nothing but a few rapidly-healing bones. It's just that there's not much use in trying to save a body once it's already begun to cool.

She started to sing to him from her sturdy wooden rocking chair on the other side of the attic on full moon nights after _Christina and the Ghost._ It was just one voice, infinitely rich in complexities, a single rope of sound wending its way through modulation after modulation. It wasn't so different than listening to talking this way, with a voice Kurt already knew right into his bones in any form. It got more difficult when she brought him back down to the sitting room to add in the piano, his father standing by tensely to ward off any disaster.

He loves it now, of course. Wolves who know what they're doing in being wolves don't lose themselves over music any more than humans collapse in a riot of color vision and the ten thousand things there are to see around them all the time, even when they're not moving. The trick is in learning to choose what to ignore.

 

~~~

 

Tina hates the five and a half mile stretch of land between Delphos and Spencerville more than just about any patch of Ohio Territory she's ever been to. And she's been to the iron ruins of Cleveland.

At a flat-out run, the distance from Artie's house to her father's takes about eleven minutes through clear, uninterrupted farmland. She's pretty sure she clocked in at under nine once, that morning when half a dozen farmhands were out in the fields with dogs and shotguns, milling around and making concerned noises behind every hedge. They were worried about a fox, or a new nest of rabbits, or some kind of crop blight, but that had never stopped a farmer sending his hounds after a wolf if he happened to run into one. Tina'd lost her favorite uncle that way, to the wrong end of a deer hunt.

She wouldn't mind it so much at night, but somehow, nine times out of ten, they find themselves together at Artie's house instead of her dad's, and nine times out of ten she's still there by dawn. If she could ever remember to leave a pair of shoes here, she'd just walk home, in the sun, like a normal person, maybe even wave to the farmers as she walked by.

But she always forgets to bring extra clothing over here because she and Artie usually spend barely any of their time alone together human, and most of that naked. And she'd attract enough attention being the barefoot girl with the yellow eyes even if all Spencerville and half of Auglaize District didn't know her as Daniel Cohen's werewolf daughter. And the road is two miles longer than the straight shot, and made of gravel, and limping eight miles until her feet hurt to walk on could be even more stupid than it would be painful.

Artie raises his head from his paws, cocks it, invites her to stay. Tina finishes straightening up--somebody with hands ought to--and leans down to ruffle behind his ears.

"Not today," she says.

They've known each other since they were twelve years old, and they're wolves together, anyway, so she doesn't say all the other things. They don't really do words between them. Words are for Kurt and Rachel and Mr. Schue, Mercedes and all the younger pups in Werewolf School. Tina and Artie have never had that much to say to each other that couldn't be said in the flick of a tail and the tilt of a head.

If Tina doesn't get going now, she's going to have trouble keeping wolf all the way home. She hasn't practiced pushing it as long as Artie, and she's fine sitting with him all night, but it's already past sun-up and it's been a long time since the last full moon.

"See you at Schue's later," Tina says, and lets herself out.

 

~~~

 

Mercedes Jones is the reason Will Schuester's secret werewolf school conspiracy ever really got started. Sure, it was little miss Rachel Berry and her overwhelming ambition that got Mr. Schue to take her in and start tutoring her in the evenings, but it was Mercedes and the Jones pack that turned it from one girl with a slate chalkboard to a closely-guarded secret shared quietly across half of Ohio Territory. The others, Kurt and Rachel and Artie and Tina, they sort of forget that sometimes.

Werewolves know. Go winter in Auglaize District for a few months, the packs say, 'cause there's a man there who'll sneak your puppies into his own home at night and teach them just like real children. Don't stay too long, though, don't you dare cause any trouble, 'cause the pack that gets Will Schuester caught or ruins it for the rest of us? They're gonna answer to every parent in Ohio Territory.

Mercedes knows three different languages, after so many winters with nothing else to do besides borrow books out of Mr. Schuester's library, listen to Kurt and Rachel bicker, or practice skinning beavers for the fur traders. Half the pack-born wolves Mercedes has ever met can't even read or write. The ones that can mostly got taught by bit wolves who lived human long enough to go right through school and then somehow managed to make it out to the woods before they got shot or went crazy, afterwards. It's different for the wolves born to human parents, accidental throwbacks like Kurt or little Gracie, but not by all that much. Gracie was ten by the time Kurt's dad and Rachel managed to talk her parents into letting her go up to Shuester's place for school, and she didn't even know her A-B-C's.

Mr. Schue's important. He gives them a place to go with actual furniture in it, someplace other than Rachel and her dads' cave or the tiny scratched-out den Mercedes has been living in since the rest of the Jones pack moved on without her. He teaches them all the things the people who run the world have to know, like maybe it'll help, and who knows, maybe someday it will. Sometimes, when it's late at night and he starts to forget, he sort of starts treating them like they're human.

It's funny, knowing a guy so well who half the werewolf grapevine in Ohio whispers about like some kind of hero. Mercedes first met Mr. Schue when she was eleven years old, dropped on his doorstep next to Rachel one night without even a warning. It kinda seems like half her life's been spent traveling to and from Auglaize District, and the other half living right here, even though she was already seventeen the first time she talked her parents into leaving without her. Mr. Schue's been right there in her life for all of that, more years than half the puppies at night school have even been alive.

You kinda get to know a guy when you've known him for that long, even if you've been calling him by his last name since before he started teaching you fractions. You remember that he's made of more things than just the ones people remember him doing, that he's only human. And it's funny, but sometimes Mercedes has to wonder if he even knows what it means, what they say about him in Allegheny and Springfield and Laurentide. If it matters to him the same way at all.

 

~~~

 

Rachel is always early to Mr. Schuester's house on school nights. Promptness is a cornerstone of a civil society, and living in a cave without clocks is no excuse for neglecting it.

They're really much too old for school any more, herself and Kurt and Mercedes and Artie and Tina, but age is no true barrier to learning. When they finally find a way to gather themselves up and move to New York, they'll need all the knowledge and practice they can get.

They aren't Mr. Schue's only students any more, of course. As the founder and first member of werewolf night school, Rachel always feels a certain sense of proprietary pride in the cubs that come through to learn here. She has every confidence that sooner or later, Auglaize District's secret reputation for werewolf-friendliness will bring her dream boyfriend out of the woods and into her life once and for all. Possibly he'll be accompanying his much younger sibling, a move that speaks wonderfully for his sense of generosity, caring, and devotion to the ones he loves. It might even be his very young son or daughter, born to a mate who was shot tragically dead by a cruel band of traveling fur trappers, freezing his heart to a lump of ice only softened by the love he bears for their small child. Rachel, obviously, will be the one to melt his heart and bring him back to the land of the truly living. Stepmotherhood isn't exactly in her plans at the moment, but she could be flexible for the sake of a truly epic romance. She's not getting any younger.

Mr. Schuester very wisely never unlocks his back door until the first wolf shows up on a school night, so Rachel changes back to human and raps sharply on the glass pane of it. Mr. Schuester appears a minute later to unlock it, carefully averting his eyes to her nakedness, as always.

Rachel spent a very long year at the age of seventeen being utterly, crushingly disappointed by that. Now that they're older and he hasn't really taught them so much as let them sit around in his living room and talk for a few years, Mercedes thinks Rachel could probably have him if she tried. Rachel thinks she's probably right, but that's not the first time she wants for herself any more. She wants flowers, romance, and sunlight, deep, longing gazes, and a dog-wolf who will pine for her at least a few weeks in recognition of all this long time she's spent pining away for him. All other criteria aside, Mr. Schuester's simply not a wolf, and much as Rachel could never be with someone who didn't recognize her truly superior talent in singing and performance, she could never settle for a man who couldn't truly appreciate her beauty in both her forms.

"Thank you, Mr. Schuester," Rachel says politely, and circles past him on her way to the spare room where they all keep their school clothes. It isn't at all impossible to make it up here on foot--Rachel herself does so regularly on low moon nights, simply for the sake of the exercise--but it is much faster and easier taken at a run.

"Coffee's on the stove when you're done," he says. "I've got some exciting things for us to work on tonight!"

She smelled the coffee brewing as soon as she got onto the property, of course, but it would be rude to mention. The house always smells like it, coffee and a faint hint of wolf, dusty books, and an almost-full bottle of aftershave Mr. Schuester dropped years ago that still hangs in the air. It's a little bit spicy, expensive, foreign-smelling, the kind of thing people must wear in New York City. It's the most exciting thing in the whole house.

 

~~

 

There's one chair in Mr. Schuester's living room, over in the shadowy corner a little bit behind the fire, that nobody ever bothers to try to sit in but Artie. Tina sits next to him sometimes, on the floor with her legs curled up under her, when she's not surrounded by wolf pups wanting help with their math and spelling. Tina's going to be a good mother someday, when she stops hanging this backwoods piece of farm country and gets on with her life.

Artie would get down on one knee if he could, but his human legs aren't really in any kind of shape for kneeling. Werewolves don't do that, anyway, getting married. Weddings are all about churches they're not allowed into and documents they don't have the legal standing to sign. Artie tries not to let it bother him. Watching Tina bend down and show the pups how to solve an algebra problem, though, sometimes it kind of irks him anyway.

There are thirteen of them here tonight, counting Mr. Schue. It was Mercedes' turn to pick up Gracie tonight; she's twelve and shows up with bruises on her arms almost every time. Rob comes in with the Drexel pups because their pack has been denning up over the falls near Beaverdam, but when they get up and move out in the next couple of months he's going to go right back to getting lost in the woods again, because he's got parents who love him enough to assume any wolf can cross half a district at night at nine years old with no problem. Emily, Theo, and Lilah are practically illiterate even though Lilah's almost fifteen, and Renee can do geometry without blinking but tonight she's refusing to talk to anyone again, even her adopted packmates. Drake is 16 and still walks twelve miles here and back twice every week because he only got bitten three months ago and hasn't figured out how to work all his legs and all his senses at the same time.

Rachel is teaching the younger ones some ridiculous catchy song she totally wrote herself with the names of all the territories and provinces in the order they joined the Empire, that the rest of them are all going to have stuck in their heads for days. Mr. Shue is standing back against the wall and watching her with a level of pride and also non-interaction with his students that makes Artie sort of uncomfortable. Kurt sits in his own corner, offering occasional commentary to the goings-on in between sketching another commission he'll sew in his basement for his stepmother to sell. Mercedes is reading a book on the couch next to him, making use of the chance for indoor lighting for once and glancing up every thirty seconds to make sure nothing's changed. Tina's on the floor next to Renee, just sitting, the two quietest things in the whole room. Sometimes one of them makes a mark on the slate between them, but mostly they're just there. Renee probably doesn't need as much instruction as everybody else here, anyway. She got to go to school as a human until last year, when she stopped having friends or a family or a home and had to start learning to catch rabbits with her teeth if she wanted to eat.

Artie remembers what human school was like. It wasn't that long ago, even if it is only getting longer. He's officially been a wolf longer than he used to be a boy, now. He's pretty sure secret werewolf night school is less boring.

Drake is standing awkwardly next to Artie's chair. Artie would offer to move somewhere a little more convenient, but this isn't his most mobile form, and shifting into wolf just to walk across the room a little more easily is both pathetic and really hard on the clothes.

"You used to be human," Drake says finally, quietly enough that the rest of the group doesn't have to hear, although except for Mr. Schuester they all can. He keeps looking awkwardly over Artie's head, instead of directly at his face, but Artie doesn't mind. He's pretty used to it by now.

"Yep," says Artie. He's the only other one in this room besides Renee and Tina, and the younger ones don't know about Tina. He's been expecting this conversation for two months.

"How did you...I mean," Drake says. "What did you do?"

Artie twists a little in his chair, trying to stretch and relieve some of the pressure on slightly mangled limbs. If he weren't a werewolf, he'd probably be paralyzed right now. Of course, if he hadn't been attacked and mauled by a werewolf he wouldn't have been injured in the first place, and it turns out there's only so much accelerated healing can do against this kind of damage.

"I spend a lot of time as the wolf," Artie says honestly. "It matters less, then." He pauses, considering. "Also, sometimes Mr. Schue lets us sing really angry songs if we persuade him we're just using them to 'practice our music'."

 

~~~

 

They spend more time in this room singing than learning from books. It's what Rachel and Kurt say is going to get them out of this damn district and into being somebody, though, so nobody argues it.

Mercedes met Kurt Hummel right in this very room. He was eleven years old, all pale skin and fancy clothes wilted by the long hike up the road, standing half behind his tall, brown-eyed and floppy-haired new stepbrother, Mr. Schuester's favorite student from the human classrooms in McKinley that he still never really talks to any of them about. She's heard plenty about Finn Hudson over the years, though. Kurt would follow that boy to the ends of the earth if their parents didn't flat-out forbid him to.

Mercedes can't really imagine being like that about either of her brothers; she was born having them and neither of them are human, but maybe that's sort of the point. Finn showed up out of nowhere and still beat up that other kid when they were thirteen for saying shit about wolves. Mercedes isn't going to forget that fight any time soon. She heard about it once a week for _years_.

It's funny how wolf Kurt can be sometimes, though, in between all the fussy human stuff he tries to do, his clothes and his cooking and his and Rachel's musical dreams. Mercedes wouldn't do loyalty like that for her brothers any more, not since she let the pack move on without her, but she would for Kurt.

They've been working on this plan for ten years now, since they realized Kurt's voice wasn't ever going to drop a whole lot and Rachel let her own plans expand to fit the two of them. "Someday," Rachel said, voice quivering with emotion, "we're going to live _here_." Her finger pressed down on the little gray square of Nassau County, right over the star for New York City, crinkling the map into the dirt of the cave floor.

"Someday," Kurt agreed. "We'll have to work on our act if we want to make it there, though. If we're going to sing in front of that many people, we'll need to be absolutely perfect."

"Of course we will, Kurt," Rachel scolded. "Please. With your countertenor, Mercedes' vocal power and my unmatched star quality, we'll take New York City by storm."

"Right! Can't wait," Mercedes hastened to agree. "Big city, here we come."

It's going to be amazing, once they finally make it. Just the three of them, or maybe they'll bring Artie and Tina, too, Mercedes isn't real sure how Rachel thinks that part of the plan's going to go, off on their own making good for themselves in the big city. Kurt and Rachel, Rachel and Kurt, and Mercedes right there in the middle of it. It's going to be amazing. It has to be.

Because if there's one thing Mercedes Jones has learned in nearly fourteen years of being their friend, it's that Rachel Berry always gets what she wants eventually, and Kurt Hummel usually has his way even sooner. It won't be like the time when they were seventeen when they made it halfway across Ohio on foot before that thunderstorm hit, they got pummeled by hail, and they lost half their stuff because Kurt's lived in his dad's basement his whole life and Rachel hasn't moved with a pack since she was ten. It won't be like the time two years later when Rachel got them a gig singing at a bar in Putnam and a couple of drunk hicks threw beer bottles at them, or the time after that when Kurt got them a gig in Sugar Creek and then almost got shot for growling at some guy who tried to feel Rachel up and wouldn't take no for an answer. It won't be like that time they got all the way east to Plymouth and got turned back at the border because it's illegal to even _be_ a werewolf in the province of Plymouth without the proper registration or permits.

Rachel's going to keep trying, and Kurt's going to keep trying, and so New York is going to happen for them, one way or another, someday. For the three of them.

 

~~~

 

"If you're very masochistic," Will's Aunt Lillian once told him, "become a farmer. They don't have to travel as much as teachers do and they worry almost as much." She'd been proud of him, though, would be proud of him if she could see her house now. It just didn't make her wrong about the worrying part, even if he's pretty sure that no teacher's ever had quite the same kind of worries he does.

He, Will Schuester, is basically constantly responsible for anywhere from six to fifteen werewolves and all the things they learn and talk about when they get together. If he does his job, he truly believes they might grow up like Rachel or Tina, educated, driven, and smart enough to find ways of using their skills positively, for the good of everyone in this society. If he doesn't do his job well enough...

Will has to believe Emma when she says she thinks he can make enough of a difference in these kids' lives to be worth the risk. Emma's got that special insight into what it's like to be one of them, with her...condition, and all.

She's the only person Will's really told about the school--well, besides Holly, who sort of found out on her own, and Terri, of course. Emma's the only one he can really talk to about it, anyway. They have lunch together on the days Will teaches in Delphos, in the sense that they sit together in her spotlessly tidy garret room in the windowless attic of the schoolhouse, and he eats his lunch while she watches. Emma loves hearing about the wolf kids.

She even has pretty good advice sometimes. She's the one who pointed out that the Newsomes might listen to a guy like Burt Hummel about their daughter before they listened to him. And she's the one who gave him the great idea to let the older kids teach some of the newer ones as much as possible, to keep them busy and out of trouble. Not that Will really thinks that the likes of, say, Artie Abrams or Tina Cohen-Chang would ever intentionally be a troublemaker, but it has to be good for them to keep some stable good influences in their lives.

Emma's the only one Will can unload on about his worries for any of them. He doesn't know if Drake is going to snap any day now and kill his own parents, or if Lilah is going to leave the district in a few months and forget everything he's spent all this time and effort trying to teach her. He doesn't know if they're ever going to persuade Artie to spend more than a few hours in their company looking human, no matter how distracting he's worried the scarring might be. He doesn't know if Rob is going to grow up to take everything Will's giving him and run off into the woods to live off the work of farmers and villagers across Ohio by theft, or even go sign up to work for Sue Sylvester and her despicable private army and turn them all in. It's a lot of pressure on Will's part to get it right.

 

~~~

 

Kurt slips down the tunnel leading to his basement about half an hour before sunrise. It's an excellent tunnel, as half-mile-long underground excavations go. Kurt dug it himself soon after his father finished building the house for Carole. It's better for everyone if the neighbors don't notice him slipping off after dark, in either form. If being able to leave the house directly from his basement means that Carole and his father don't realize exactly how many nights Kurt spends away from home, well. That's probably better for them too.

The basement was his father's consolation bribe for replacing his first wife and son with Carole and Finn, who, being neither dead nor in any way werewolves, could finally give him the family he'd always deserved. Kurt didn't blame him for it, of course. He couldn't. Finn and Carole were both wonderful, and anyway, Kurt knew what it felt like to wish for more of your own kind. His father deserved to be happy. He hugged Kurt without any visible or olfactory signs of fear, and Kurt got his own basement.

The basement suite is sleek in white and gray and, aside from the scratches gouged deep into the paint of the alcove set behind the metal bars on the north side of the room, pristine. Most of the claw marks are set much too close together to fit Kurt's paws now, but that's another thing Carole and his father are better off never looking too closely at. He's used it a few times in the past couple of years, when the others were busy or too far away on a full moon night to run safely together. It's good to have. Just...in case.

One of the good things about being a wolf, few as they are, is Kurt's complete ability to flop down onto his gratuitously overstuffed mattress and fall instantly asleep no matter the time of day or night. He stops to change into his pyjamas and run through his facial cleansing cycle. This face is as human as he'll ever get to look. Kurt intends to take care of it.

He rarely dreams much, unless it's close to the full moon, and then it's all mixed-up fragments of sensation that seem nothing at all like the linear surrealism Dad or Carole describe when they talk about their odd dreams at breakfast. These are more violent than usual, a slice of growling menace underlying the smell of red silk, a dank cave, the taste of smoke.

He wakes up at noon to the sound of a truck pulling up outside. It isn't his dad's; this one has a slightly different pitch to its engine, and the break pads are about to go. Both of his parents ought to be at church and brunch in town until three or four, just like every Sunday. That makes this his responsibility.

Kurt takes the time to pull together a quick outfit and run a brush through his hair anyway. Nobody respects a werewolf in pyjamas.

Halfway up the basement steps he sniffs the air and quickens his pace, because somebody's brought a pair of wolves to his front door, and unless he's forgotten the scent of him in the past two years 'somebody' means Finn. His brother is not exactly the most careful of men at the best of times. Kurt wonders if it would be hypocritical of him to grab his father's shotgun from its rack on his way out the front door. Then he does it anyway.

The doorbell rings--of course, Finn can't be expected to keep his keys for an entire month, let alone the two years since he last visited home--and Kurt pauses a moment to check his hair in the hall mirror before he opens it. Good first impressions are, after all, key.

"Hey," Finn says, breaking into a wide, tired smile that, much like Finn himself, manages to be breathtaking in its simple sincerity. Kurt can see the wolves over his shoulder, a small blonde bitch carrying a bag, a brawny dog without any clothes on lounging against the hood of Finn's rusty blue pickup. "So...I kinda quit my job," he says. The wolves both have tan lines around their throats. What in the name of hell has Finn brought down on them? "And my friends kind of need someplace to stay for a while. Can we come in?"

 

~~~

 

Finn's childhood home is bigger than she expected, for a little town like McKinley, and kept almost as neatly as her mother's house. Quinn guesses, without having much to go on besides an immediate gut impression, that far less of that is down to Finn's own mother than to the incredibly fussy stepbrother she'd never known he had. Kurt would probably be hilarious, if she weren't so sick and exhausted right now. Domestic wolves always pick up the weirdest neuroses.

Or maybe she'd be grateful, as he hands her a stack of fluffy white towels and steers her into a room with a huge clawfoot bathtub, water already running and steaming hot. She'd be thankful that he's even giving her the time of day, let alone this much space and privacy to get herself clean while the three of them go off to talk like the men only one of them could ever hope to be. She'd be lowering her eyes in submission instead of finding herself staring blankly past everyone she's talking to in a way that can only partially be explained by a night without sleep.

This is her life now, Quinn reminds herself as she slips into the bathtub. This is her life now, as she runs the soft, soapy washcloth over the skin of her throat. This is her life now, and she hasn't come this far to lay down just a little lower and drown herself in Finn Hudson's mother's bathtub.

If she narrows her thoughts down just to this room, to this bath, she can breathe again, if you don't count nearly choking on the steam. The towels smell like lavender and the soap like vanilla, the room itself like the lingering, washing-day scent of bleach. She's not crying. She's not. There's no one to see her at it, anyway.

Quinn didn't let herself cry in the woods, not more than a couple of gasps leaning back against a tree to collect her composure, but she's got nowhere to be now and nothing but time. At first it's just a trickle dripping from the corner of her eyes, nothing she can't blame on the bathwater, but then she heaves a breath, too harshly, and then another, and another, and then she's crying like she's never going to stop. She has the presence of mind to yank the stopper out of the drain and turn the tap back on to cover the sound of it from the hall. Then Quinn wraps her arms around her knees and sobs.

It's not fair. It's not fair that she's had her whole life ripped away from her twice. It's not fair that all she wanted was just one little taste of something human. Her life is over, and Quinn is only twenty-four, and she doesn't want to die.

 

~~~

 

Even when Finn was a teenager he was a giant, but when Kurt said it was probably better not to push his dad's good graces by borrowing his clothes, Finn grimaced and nodded, so Puck's swimming in denim and flannel. He didn't even bother asking about Kurt's clothing; pup's skinnier than a bitch on a diet, and whatever you call what he's wearing, it looks like it belongs on a west-town prostitute.

Seriously, having to work out clothes wherever he is every single time he changes back to being human? Totally going to be the worst thing about leaving Sue Sylvester. Not that Puck's got any problem with a little casual nakedness between friends, it's just that it tends to make the human-type ladies more nervous than they already are.

Anyway clothes are probably the least of Puck's problems, because this may legitimately be the most awkward dinner he's had to sit through since that time his Ma brought over the only rabbi in the district without telling him, and he came in naked halfway through with two black eyes from a scuffle with some lone dogs passing through the other end of the valley.

"Would anybody like more potatoes?" Finn's ma offers a little too brightly. Kurt slaps his father's hand away from the serving spoon without even looking, and on Puck's other side, Quinn flinches like somebody's about to get hit.

"Oh, come on," Mr. Hummel protests, and Kurt rolls his eyes.

"You've already had two helpings, and don't think I don't know exactly how much salt and butter is in those."

"You're the one that made them," Mr. Hummel points out, and Kurt nods.

"For our guests, who can have as much more as they like. I can only imagine what you've been eating," and suddenly his sharp-eyed judgment is swinging around to point right at Puck and Quinn, and jeeze, doesn't this pup know Puck could snap him in half if he wanted? "the dietary habits of most wolves left to their own devices are usually atrocious when it comes to getting enough vegetables, and don't think I don't know what _you're_ likely to have been living on, Finn Hudson."

Finn guiltily lets the last slice of roast beef slide off the serving fork and back onto the platter. "It's a busy job, I had a lot on my plate. I ate what the landlady gave me."

"Pity the poor woman trying to keep up with you," Kurt sniffs, and yeah, okay, if this is what Finn grew up around, no wonder the troop's wolf bitches didn't scare him.

"They served a lot of vegetables in the troop, actually," Quinn says out of nowhere, sounding weirdly flat, like she doesn't even care enough to be pissed off. "Chief Sylvester is very invested in proper nutrition."

"Well," says Kurt, "I'm glad she gets something right."

"How long are you all planning on staying, anyway?" Mr. Hummel asks, cutting Puck off before he can think of a better response than a growl. Yeah, maybe she threw Quinn out and would probably kill both of them if she had the chance, but like hell if Sue Sylvester isn't a bigger badass on her laziest day off than this dog has ever been in his whole life. "I know you've got that full moon day after tomorrow, and I don't know if Kurt's cage is big enough for all three of you..."

"I'm not setting foot in any cage," Quinn says instantly, the same moment that Puck says,

"Like hell I'm spending full moon in a cage. I haven't used one of those since I was eight." Okay, maybe he was like fourteen, but it was just that one time. Still, nobody but nobody is getting Puckzilla back behind bars without a loaded rifle and shitload of luck.

"Guys, they don't really use cages in the troop, I think Puck and Quinn will be just fine on their--"

"Now hold on a minute, Finn. You ask me to take a couple of strange werewolves into my home on nothing but your word, that's one thing, but all of the sudden you want us to be responsible for what happens if they go running around out there on a full moon and kill somebody?" Mr. Hummel asks. "Not gonna happen, buddy," he says firmly.

"Dad, Rachel and Mercedes don't even have cages, they go out on full moons all the time," Kurt says, a little too desperately, and Puck sneaks a glance over at Quinn to see if she's noticed it too. Somebody's not as good a boy as he wants people to believe. Finn, of course, is totally oblivious.

"Mr. Hummel, I think when you consider the amount of time and training Puck and I have both had even to be considered for Sue Sylvester's wolf troop in the first place," Quinn says.

"Dude, whatever, if this is the welcome we're gonna get, I'll go right out and den up myself, I don't care," says Puck.

"Well," says Finn's mom. "If everybody's finished with their dinners, who wants pie?"

 

~~~

 

Tina's good about practicing her scales. It keeps her busy when her father's not home and she can't handle spending a whole day at Artie's. It's not like the house is overflowing with things for her to do otherwise.

Her dad works. It's not like there's a lot of friendliness in Spencerville for Daniel Cohen, with his come-and-go werewolf mistress and her crazy daughter, but you're not supposed to like your accountants. You're just supposed to trust that it would be easy to round up a torch-wielding mob if they ever breathed a word of your secrets to your wife. He makes enough money to have indulged all of Tina's most out-there fashion experiments before she started just letting Kurt make her clothes. They all need something to keep themselves busy during the day.

Tina reads. There's a bookseller in downtown Spencerville that she walks to once a week, rain or moon, to buy and trade. It's sort of the only time she sees humans, besides her dad and Mr. Schue; wandering around town as Daniel Cohen's crazy dramatic half-werewolf daughter got a lot less fun around the time she finally talked her mother into letting her drop the 'half'. The bookseller stocks all kinds of things Mr. Schue doesn't have in his library, slim paperback essays by social theorists in New York and Roanoke, picture books that she sometimes buys to bring to the puppies. Tina likes the really dreary gothic novels, when she can sneak them past her father--the ones where it's all passionate tragic romance, and everybody dies at the end, and sometimes there's vampires.

(Artie says that Miss Pillsbury over at the school in Delphos is a vampire, but Tina's pretty sure she doesn't believe him. Any vampire she's ever read about would have way better taste than to live--or unlive--in Auglaize District, Ohio.)

Sometimes there are werewolves, too, although usually they only show up to tear somebody's love interest apart or provide an appropriate air of menace to a scene. Mostly it's just dark windows and lots of consumption and billowing nightgowns. Tina can dig that.

Today she's practicing her scales, because the full moon is tomorrow and she can't sit still long enough to read. She's never going to hit the High F that Rachel and Kurt keep bickering about, but she can stay in tune for backup when Rachel tries to expose the pups to culture by singing the entire libretto to _Pygmalion_ from end to end (Kurt pitches in on the duet-y parts). Somebody's got to do the "mmm mmm mmm" bits. Tina's good at those.

There's a gray spring drizzle in the air, dampening everything down, making noses twitch and sounds carry farther. There's no storm on any horizon, just the lingering wet of steady drops. She keeps the windows closed and the curtains drawn against it.

That's why she doesn't hear the truck pull up until the heavy *thud* of boots sounds against the front porch. Then the doorbell rings.

It's weird enough to be scary, because anybody in the whole district who might want to see her dad knows where his office is and that he's there all day, and the only ones who ever come to see her show up naked and come in through the back. Anyway, every wolf knows, full moon means guns the day before and fires the day after. People get too nervous to leave their homes on the night, so first they set up and prepare and then they go out for vengeance after. Today's not a good day to go anywhere on four legs.

The nervous, paranoid feeling doesn't go away when she opens the door to see Kurt there by himself, fully dressed, not even when she notices the unfamiliar truck behind him. She knew Kurt knows how to drive, but he doesn't, why would he, when anywhere that he ought to go is better on paws and at night when nobody will see.

"We have a problem," Kurt says simply.


	3. We're Only Human Sometimes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The moon pulls your insides out, fills you with thunder, then leaves you to flounder and gasp out your exhaustion when the sun comes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we go! Finally. You should all thank crown_of_weeds for redeeming several well-earned brownie points to get me to sit down and write this damn thing.
> 
> Chapter title from I'm Only Human Sometimes, by William Control, which can be found [here](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7PDOCTea_U). The bible verse Quinn quotes is from the Book of Lamentations; the 'she' in question is actually a city/nation, but that's the joy of interpreting bible passages.

The twitching, itchy rumble of nerves starts building too much to easily ignore an hour or two before sunset. Sitting still isn't painful yet, just a struggle of self-control. The edges of everything, shapes, sounds, scents, sharpen around her by inches.

The moon pours out her energy and the sun retakes it for himself, isn't it just like a male, whatever the species. He can't counter what's building tonight though, long as he shines, and he'll set soon anyway. She isn't that much fuller than last night, or even the night before that. What's the difference between 95 and 100%? 97? 99? It's nothing. It's a world. It's the space between broken and limping and whole.

The last few hours waiting for the sun to go always make Mercedes a poet to her own mind, a philosopher, a genius of art and life. There are lifechanging epiphanies to discover again and anew every single month with all the speed and joy of old friends whose glowing truth she's somehow neglected for the past four weeks. She'll lose this again tomorrow but for now she doesn't want to envision how, because right now her brain is like quicksilver, fast and shining and probably ready to poison her if she holds onto it for too long.

Now is the hour when all good wolves seal themselves away to scream and beat themselves against nothing, but Mercedes is herself, Mercedes is _free_ , for all the thousand-and-one ways she could list right this moment that the world makes them all slaves, her mind races ahead to point out. But it is freedom still, she is free tonight to throw herself against nothing but earth and air and very beating heart of the world, and the moon, the moon, the _moon_

 _**rises** _

There's nothing in her eyes but a kaleidescope of streaking gray, but her ears and her nose and her fur reverberate with everything she can't see. She has to, has to, must do _something_ , she is heavy as air and full to the brim with lightning. Luckily her head is running away already with a thousand and one ideas for what. Running actually sounds like a fantastic fucking start. Fucking sounds like a fantastic second. There's no pun in that sentence, too bad, she had a good thing going there for a moment, but her paws have hit the ground faster than a galloping horse and it doesn't matter, not yet, not ever, not tonight. Horse, that sounds delicious. There, she knew she could do it, now she's got a plan for dinner even if she knows better than to try to keep it. The grain of gravel beneath her toe pads is cold and smooth and sharp in ways so vivid she can't imagine why she's never noticed it before, but of course she has, a month ago, and she will again and again and again, goddess the moon, world without end, wolf in the woods and everything bright like lightning.

 

~~~

 

He's standing on the banks of some local river he doesn't even know the name of, already covered in fur, when the sun sets and the full surge of Her comes through. Instantly, as sudden and necessary as breathing-gasping-screaming, Puck raises his head to Her and howls. At least a dozen different voices across the forest sing the chorus with him.

They're four right now, two dogs and two bitches, and they could probably conquer the goddamned empire between them. Kurt's lean and sly and quick, his bitch is hefty and fearless, Quinn is bristling fit to tear the whole world to shreds, and there are miles of woods in every fucking direction like a playground just ready for them to hit it.

Kurt takes off into the undergrowth, towards the sound of not-too-distant howls, and hell, sure, that's a great start, Puck and both bitches streak out after him. Puck's never been over any of this terrain, it's fucking awesome, racing through just at the edge of too fast to process what he's passing as he streaks by, the funny bushes and that crazy rock formation, squirrels and owls nesting in the tops of trees, the smell of water trickling by underground. He can identify all of it, knows all of it, and it physically hurts to even think about being one of those poor bastards who never give themselves a chance to smell-hear- _know_.

Quinn is spoiling for a fight. Puck's had moons like that before, when it all just comes angry and goes furious. The only thing you'd get from throwing her in a shared cage tonight would be the price of admission and the house cut on all the bets over which wolf would be walking out. This isn't gonna go pretty but it might go awesome.

Kurt said they were gonna meet up with more of his friends after moonrise. Puck's hoping for more bitches, though the one they met at the riverbank is a good start. Twelve hours pressed ankle to shoulder against the whole side of Quinn's body with nothing but a scrap of blanket between them, the moon in his head and his blood, and Puck's as ready for a hard, hot fuck as Quinn is to tear the throat out of the first thing that fights her back. There's cougar in these woods for sure, anyway. Maybe if he finds Quinn what she wants, she'll give him something of the same back himself.

He hears them before anything else, most of a mile and barely a minutes' run through the undergrowth, two bitches and a dog a little smaller than him. They don't move like wolves that have ever seen cages. Only one of them is even a little bit hesitant with the flick of her ears, the tip of her tail, hanging close enough to the other dog that Puck knows he's not getting anything there tonight. The other bitch, though, comes at them in full gallop, barreling into Kurt hard enough to send them both crashing to the ground even though she's literally half Puck's size. Then he's up and snapping at her neck while she dances back out of the way, teeth catching only fur, and oh, it is _on_.

It's like moon nights with the troop only the play-fighting starts out less vicious, at least until Quinn jumps into the mix. Not one of these wolves is over-clumsy or too scared. They're fucking gorgeous.

Quinn lunges a little too hard at the tiny fireball, bites enough to draw blood. Puck shoulders her aside and bears her down to the ground before any of the others can get to her. The bitch clinging to her dog is starting to smell all hot and ready, and Quinn's hard and trembling under his chest. Puck whines the question even as he slides across to straddle her back.

Quinn growls and bucks him off violently, whirling on him so fast he only narrowly misses finding himself disemboweled. Fuck. Fucking _Quinn_. Okay, he's not getting any there tonight. Puck noses over to the little bitch he totally just saved, whining a little. It's the full moon; they're all a little desperate for it, right, to move and run and hunt and kill and seriously, just _anything_ will pretty much do right now. She knows it. She's standing here in the moon too.

She's completely into him, nosing over herself to check out the new stud in town, before Kurt sticks his head in and growls Puck off. He is seriously starting to climb Puck's nerves. There's no way Kurt's hitting that—he's obviously one of _those_ wolves, which, whatever, Puck's all for sex, but not when he's not having any of it, and especially when he's not having it because of some scrawny dog who's not even interested in screwing the bitch in question. And seriously, again, Puck could break him with one bite.

Of course then the rest of his pack circles around to back him, and Quinn lowers her head and growls at Puck, vicious and warning. Puck backs off. He's horny, not _stupid_ , and maybe tonight he feels like he could challenge God to a fight and win, but that doesn't add up to challenging six other wolves just as super-powered as him.

They're watching him warily as he circles off, just starting to relax, when one of them—the big husky fierce bitch, the one who almost took a chunk out of Quinn's thigh—raises her head to scent the air and sets up a howl. Puck lifts his nose to sniff. There's elk in the woods tonight. It's not what he was hoping for but it's good, and anyway there's always later. Nights are long when the moon is full.

Stupid elk. Lucky wolves.

 

~~~

 

The comedown from full moon night can arrive as quickly and powerfully as the roiling mania of the night before. The first beam of sunlight always hits Rachel like a stone wall, and she crashes into it running as fast as a wolf can go.

They flop down in their tracks, all seven of them, falling on their bellies and sides in the middle of a pine thicket, panting and exhausted. Suddenly, the fact that they've run almost two hundred miles of circles in the past ten hours is too much to even bear. Their hearts should burst just from the effort of thinking about it.

Between one panting, heaving breath and another Rachel's fur disappears. It's just too much to even try to hold on to right now. Tina, who toppled over right in Rachel's line of sight, is splayed out on her back with her long black hair already tangled full of pine needles. She manages to raise her head just in time to see the shaking, shivering ball of Kurt go from gray-gold to pale bare skin. Rachel can't quite bear to push herself up enough to look around too much for the others. Mercedes is probably still wolf, and Artie always holds it, just like Daddy H; he always says it takes more effort to try switching back.

She can see the shoulders of the fierce, furious bitch that must be Kurt's brother's friend, though. She's blonde in this body, hunched over, silently crying. Rachel feels an instant surge of sympathy. Her own cheeks seem dry this morning, but she can't count the times she's fallen back into her human skin so full of feeling and exhaustion that there was no other way to let it escape but tears.

"So where are we?" asks an unfamiliar voice behind Rachel. The big bold dog-wolf who tried to mount every female but Tina, surely, but Rachel slumps back to the ground without bothering to look. She's glad Kurt stepped in for her moon-clouded judgment there; they've done the same for each other enough times before. The dog sounds much too composed to be real, but he's too careful not to be lying about it.

Tina lifts her head just long enough to sniff the air, then drops it back flat. "Seven or eight miles from McKinley, almost thirty to Delphos?" she says. "We came back pretty far in."

Rachel groans. "Mercedes, you're closest," she says. "Can we?"

Mercedes yips in agreement, interrupted by Kurt whining so high in his throat it still sounds canine.

"I have to get back before Dad and Carole try to check on me," he says. "Tina?"

"My dad thinks I'm at Rachel's," she says. "I'm good until tonight. Sorry, Kurt, it's just you."

"It's fine," Kurt says, extending a single hand from his otherwise unmoving curled form to flap in Tina's direction. "I've got half an hour, I'm sure I'll be practically through the back door just as soon as I stand up."

"Dude, who can stand up?" the new dog groans.

The blonde bitch hasn't said anything yet. She hasn't even lifted her head from where it's pillowed on her arm, she's just staring blankly off into space. It takes a truly Herculean effort, but Rachel forces herself more-or-less to her hands and knees to crawl over to her.

"Hi," she says quietly. "I'm Rachel Berry. Let me just repeat any welcome Kurt may have already given you and add that if there's anything you need—I know that full moon nights can be very stressful, especially if you don't have as much skill or experience in coping with them as we do, of course, but if you'd like to talk about it—"

The other wolf raises her head, then, and finally fixes Rachel with a pair of tear-soaked golden eyes. "I need you," she annunciates quite clearly, "to get the fuck away from me." She punctuates the demand with something like a snarl, surprising enough that Rachel tumbles backwards to the ground.

 

~~~

 

Finn is pacing a little. He jitters too much when he tries to sit down. Probably he shouldn't have started in on that second pot of coffee before the sun had even finished rising, but Kurt still isn't home and Finn's about five minutes away from grabbing his keys and taking the truck out to look for him before Mom and Dad wake up.

He's supposed to know where Puck and Quinn are, too. Kurt is, not Finn, even though they're Finn's responsibility, he's the one who brought them to McKinley in the first place. Kurt's sort of Finn's brother and all and Finn trusts him, but he has this way of getting around things and sometimes lying right through his teeth to get his way. It was one thing when they were kids but right now it's not cool at all, especially when Puck and Quinn are counting on Finn to keep them safe. Kurt's supposed to be right here, in this basement, waking up in that cage and waiting for someone to bring him warm milk with that bitchy impatient look on his face.

There's a scuffle behind Finn, on the side of the room totally opposite the stairs, and he spins suddenly. He gropes vainly for the department-issue pistol that wouldn't be by his side even if he hadn't left it in Lima with his badge, because he sorta forgot that he's still in pyjamas. There's this crazy big mirror that's as tall as Finn that Kurt usually keeps tucked up against one wall, but it's sliding out sort of on its own, scraping against the bare stone of the floor. Then Kurt stumbles out from behind it, pale and sort of dirty and totally, 100% naked. There's a hole in the wall back there that Finn never noticed before. Kurt looks about twenty seconds away from collapsing.

He raises his eyes to meet Finn's for one long second—Finn's not sure what's on his face, surprise or worry or how pissed off he's been getting—before Kurt drops his head and sort of trips into the nearest chair. Finn winces a little. He's sat on that chair.

"What are you doing down here?" Kurt asks, his voice scratchy and lower than usual.

"Me? I came to check on you. Where the hell have _you_ been?" Finn demands. "There was a full moon last night!"

"Yes, the urge to run all the way to Havannah and back just for the hell of it was sort of a clue," Kurt says dryly.

"Do Mom and Dad know about this?" Finn demands. "Do they know you've been...sneaking out, like—"

"If they knew it wouldn't be sneaking, would it?" Kurt snaps. "I'm as old as you are, Finn, I think I can take myself outside if I want."

"Not if it's dangerous! And you know it's dangerous, too, that's why you have that in the first place," Finn waves at the cage in the corner, standing empty and unused. "Did you even take Puck and Quinn to your friend's? Where are they?"

"Your girlfriend and your new pet are just fine. They're recovering at Mercedes' with everyone else right now."

"So all your other wolf friends were involved in this?" Finn demands. "Do you go out like that every full moon?"

"Rachel and Mercedes' parents are werewolves, Finn, they've never seen the inside of a cage in their lives," Kurt snaps. "I know it offends your sense of domestication, but we're not exactly puppies any more, and some of us want something other than to live out the rest of our lives as guard dogs and house pets that occasionally have to do the cooking and the laundry."

"I thought you liked cooking," says Finn. Kurt rolls his eyes.

"Yes, I let myself out on full moon nights, and yes, I run with Rachel and Mercedes and Artie and Tina. I don't see why not," he says shortly. "It's certainly not any of your business."

"Dude, what _happened_ while I was gone?" Finn asks in bewilderment. He remembers Rachel from before he left, kind of, his brother's really short werewolf friend who'd said almost nothing the couple of times he met her. Kurt always said she talked a lot, but Finn never really believed him. And he's not sure if he ever even met Mercedes, even though Kurt talked about her a bunch too. They all seemed...Finn doesn't know, happy. Kurt had a place to sleep and Mr. Schue taught them all kinds of stuff Quinn says most werewolves never get to learn at all, so what went wrong?

"What, you mean growing up?" Kurt asks. "It's a process living things go through where they stop being children and, theoretically speaking, turn into actual adults who like to make their own decisions about things such as where they want to be on full moon nights."

"No, I just..." This isn't right. Finn rubs at his face tiredly. He knows Kurt, they practically grew up together, they've been brothers since forever, and all of this—the sneaking out, wanting to go out on a moon night at all, the arguing and the lying to their parents...it's just not him. "What happened to New York?"

"It's still there, as far as I'm aware," Kurt says. "Why, do you need directions?"

"I need you to start making sense!" Finn shouts back. "What the hell is all this? You can't just go running around on a full moon. You _know_ that's dangerous. Are you even thinking about what would happen to Mom or your dad if somebody caught you? Or my job, if Chief Sylvester's troop ever had to go out and put down my own stepbrother?"

"Well you don't have to worry about that any more, will you?" Kurt says, very very tightly. "I'm sorry my death would have been such an inconvenience to your career—"

"No, come on, I didn't mean it like that..." Finn says helplessly. "Every time I hear you talking about those guys, you're always going on about how someday you're going to find a way to move to New York and be stars. Do you think they just let werewolves run around every full moon in New York? Do you?"

"Well it's a good thing we're not going, then, isn't it?" Kurt asks. Finn blinks.

"Wait, why not?" he asks. "It's all you guys have talked about for, like, ever. Why are you even still here, weren't you supposed to all be big stars by—"

"We're putting on a _show_ , Finn," Kurt snaps. "Maybe you've never bothered to notice but that's what we _do_ , Rachel and Mercedes and me, we're performers and we put on shows. Only since we don't have an audience and we're never going to get one we put it on for ourselves, pretending like we're ever going to get out of this place or make it anywhere. I know you can't actually imagine what that sort of life is like, but eventually Mercedes is going to leave to go back to her family and Artie will run off with Tina, and so it'll just be me and Rachel, living here in caves for the rest of our short and unfortunate lives, but if we admit that then we've got nothing left at all, so we _put on a show_."

There's silence in the basement for a moment. Finn's not really sure when this whole conversation went off the rails, but he thinks it might have been when Kurt wasn't sprawled on the floor of his cage ready to look up at him gratefully for a hand up and a glass of warm milk just like they were fifteen again.

 

~~~

 

They sleep, or pretend to, for about four hours or so. After that Quinn can't take the waiting any more, so she gets up from the rocky floor of the den, a little shaky, and kicks at Puck's shins until he rolls over to look up at her.

"Can you find the way back from here?" she asks. She's a better tracker than a navigator, and last night is still mostly a horrible blur for her. She can only imagine what kind of first impression she's made.

Kurt had offered it as a compromise. He and his friends didn't trust them out on the full moon alone. It should have made Quinn snort in derision at the role reversal—some untrained dog with no business setting even a whisker outside of a cage on a full moon night didn't trust _them_ —but at the time, she'd been too numb to care.

The one named Mercedes had shifted back to human when they crawled in, an hour after daylight. She stood up just long enough to pull some bread and jerky down from the shelves and leave it sitting next to the tiny stone hearth, and to throw a pile of threadbare, hand-sewn quilts on the floor. Then she'd curled in next to Rachel Berry, not a stitch of clothing between them, pulled one of the blankets over them and fallen immediately to sleep. The third bitch, Tina, Quinn thought, was wrapped half around her still-wolf lover whose name Quinn still doesn't know. It wasn't like there'd been a whole lot of conversation last night.

Puck had sprawled out on his back and left her alone, but Quinn was too worn and sick to her stomach to enjoy it. She just laid there, wrapped in as much quilt as she could grab from the pile, reminding herself to breathe slowly until the tremors quieted down. She dozed some, she thinks; the sun's well up in the sky and time feels a little fuzzy. She's not sure.

Just the lying there in the dark helped, even surrounded by the close, unfamiliar bulk of four strangers plus Puck whose breathing echoes noisily against the walls of the den. It was a bad night, and she can still taste the scum of elk blood on her tongue, but she's had bad nights before.

Finn's waiting. Puck shoots her a withering look before rolling unsteadily to his feet, shaking his head like a dog to clear it.

“Come on, Puck, let's go,” Quinn urges. In less than an hour she can be back in the quiet safety of the Hummels' giant bathtub. Not that she needs to give in to her own weaknesses like she did the day before last, but her skin is itching to be clean again.

“I'm not going anywhere until I have something to eat,” Puck says mulishly, wobbling over to the little ledge in the rock where Mercedes left the bread.

“Puck, I don't have time for this.” Quinn crosses her arms impatiently. It's chilly in the cave, without the quilt on any more. She wants to be back in her fur again. Just this once.

“Hey, a dog's got to eat,” Puck shrugs. He tears into the bread and holds the other half of the loaf vaguely in her direction.

“You just had half an elk!” Quinn's stomach grumbles in spite of herself.

“Take the damn bread and hush up,” Mercedes mumbles, muffled and barely intelligible.

“Fine,” says Quinn. “Fine, take the bread, I don't care. Let's just get out of here.”

She's too tired, sore, and quivery inside to be more polite to her sleeping hosts. Puck follows her out into the night, munching noisily.

It's a bright, clear early morning outside, sunny enough to hurt her eyes.

 

~~~

 

Tina always thinks about her mom the most on the days after the full moon. It's not that she misses her more, exactly; when Tina remembers her mom in the middle of the month, living with a distant father and a boyfriend who doesn't like to look at her or anything else through human eyes, sometimes it feels like she'd give anything for a tight hug and somebody who knows all the answers to everything. But life in Spencerville is Tina's burden to bear. It's something Kurt understands, and Artie, in his way, and Rachel and Mercedes and even some of the pups, the ones who are stuck here too. It's not the kind of problem Tina's mom actually knows how to solve, no matter how much Tina still wants her to be perfect.

Helen Chang's never stayed in one place longer than six months in her life, not even to have a baby. She just brought Tina back to grow up somewhere ' _safe'_ as soon as they found out Tina wasn't one of those 2% of halfbreeds who came out a wolf.

They think it's about 2%—Tina found that out from another one of those essay pamphlets they never really talk about at Mr. Schue's house. It's hard to tell. Most moms like Tina's bite their babies as soon as they come out, just to make sure. And she's pretty sure a werewolf sire isn't enough to keep plenty of human families from drowning halfbreed puppies before they switch back their first time. Just like the throwbacks with no wolf in their family tree at all. It might even be more—at least when you know one parent is a wolf, you know to be watching for it.

Tina didn't have her first full moon until she was thirteen, and her mom stayed right by her side the whole time. It wasn't _like_ Artie's. She wishes she knew whether to be sorry about that, or even _how_.

Tina's mom is small, though she's bigger than Rachel, with short, coal-black hair and fur and sharp brown eyes that notice _everything_. When Tina was fifteen, she watched her mom face down a mountain lion and make it back away just by growling. She's so _in control_. Tina never feels like that, except on full moon nights. She doesn't think she ever has. Her dad's house is quiet and dust-free, with thick pale curtains draped over all the windows, and it's Tina's home, but that doesn't make it hers to decide over. Artie's house isn't hers at all.

The first time Tina ran down a deer by herself, she was only just fourteen years old. It was out in the woods not too far from McKinley, under a silver-swollen moon in the first week of September, and nothing in the world had ever tasted as hot and ripe and made for eating as raw deer from a kill she'd made herself. She _howled_ that night, cried her throat raw. The Chang pack bedded down in a dry gully full of dead leaves that morning, Tina right in the middle of them.

Full moon nights are like that. Tina always knew they would be, although she severely underestimated just how much it sucks to wake up naked with your dad hanging around outside your cage, carefully looking the other way. Still, he hasn't been really strict about keeping her in at night in years. Waking up warm and sore and sated, wrapped around Artie and surrounded by her closest friends in the world...it always makes her think about her mother.

That's the thing about growing up, Tina guesses. All the things her mom is amazing at are all the things Tina's already learned enough to feel confident over. It's everything else she has to figure out by herself.

 

~~

 

Finn doesn't tell their parents anything while Kurt is passed out that morning, buried in every blanket he owns, which he supposes is the best he could ask for.

He'd forgotten what it was like, having a not-actually-older-but-definitively- _bigger_ brother around to get in the way being helpful all the time. The house has settled into its own quiet patterns since Finn left, Kurt alone in his basement domain, Burt and Carole moving across the now-too-empty second floor in a married couple's dance that, for once, invites nobody else. They meet on the ground floor all meaningful glances and discussions of business; Kurt's father still hugs him all the time, but everybody knows the right script. The air doesn't exactly hang heavy with all the things nobody wants to hear that desperately want saying anyway, like Artie's house, or whenever it's his turn to pick up Gracie for school and everything's thick and choking. The Hummel-Hudsons just tuck it all away with the clean folded linen, Kurt's mother's old sewing machine under his bed, Christopher Hudson's dress uniform on a shelf in a closet upstairs.

Finn, and Kurt doesn't know how less than six years was enough to let him forget this, is _loud_. Kurt remembered the fact but not the feeling of it, how a house really meant for a family of five or six could always seem small around him. Finn tends to disrupt things without even thinking about it, just because he's a little slow to notice the patterns everybody else is following with ease, and because even when he knows how things are supposed to go he's the worst dancer Kurt's ever tried to teach.

Of course everything shrinks in and gets pulled out and messed around when Finn comes home. Kurt can't say he hasn't missed his brother, would never say he doesn't love him, even that he didn't love some of the warmth and chaos and noise that Finn always brought into their generously-shared childhood, but Kurt's not fifteen any more. Neither, of course, are the 'close friends' Finn dragged home this time, yellow in their eyes and enough pent-up lust and rage to turn a full moon into a bloodbath if Kurt hadn't warned everybody to be ready for them. Kurt can't help but wonder, a little wearily, just how Finn's best-intentioned clumsiness disrupted _their_ patterns to bring them here.

They're back at the house by the time he drags himself upstairs, scrubbed clean and deliberately put-together. There's an echo of last night shivering in his bones, something tense and coiled along his spine that's charged back up again for another month, like a spring that's been rewound just a little too tightly. It's easier to keep it in under fine fabrics with perfect creases, even if he is too hungry and impatient to light a fire and heat the iron up this afternoon.

Finn is nowhere to be seen. Puck and Quinn are in the sitting room with Carole, Puck sprawled semi-obscenely across most of the couch and apparently dozing, Quinn with her legs crossed at the ankles, small and contained, reading a book from the shelves. A few steps closer, and Kurt realizes the only book in the house _that_ thick is Carole's bible. So Finn goes away for a few years, stops telling them about his life, and brings home a touchy, pent-up Sylvester Troop bitch with a thing for _religion_. Kurt stops himself from rolling his eyes just in time. He wishes he could be surprised.

“Kurt, you're up.” Carole smiles over her sewing basket. “I know you must be hungry, sweetheart, I've got a plate for you keeping warm in the oven.”

“Thanks, Carole,” Kurt says, then stifles a yawn with his hand. “Where's Finn?”

“Oh, he was pacing around making a nuisance of himself waiting for our guests to come back, so I sent him off with Burt for the day,” Carole replies easily. “They only just got back around 11:00. Quinn here's been keeping me company while I do my sewing for the day.” Puck, Kurt notices out of the corner of one eye, twitches. So, not really asleep after all.

“How nice of her,” Kurt says, and tries to keep the dryness out of his voice. When Carole wants company for her sewing, she goes down to Miss Marigold's dress shop and spends all afternoon gossiping with the other town seamstresses and housewives. She nearly always ends up coming home with a new bolt of fabric for Kurt and at least one new commission for “her” to fill within the next couple of weeks. She hadn't wanted to leave a pair of strange wolves alone in the house. Brave, since not even Kurt would have been enough to protect her if something _had_ gone wrong.

“How was your night?” Quinn asks sweetly, raising her head. There is something seriously, venomously wrong with her. Kurt can't forget her going for Rachel's throat last night, or for Puck's underbelly.

If there's one thing Kurt _hasn't_ forgotten about his brother, it's how to read Finn like a billboard. Finn's so in love with Quinn that Kurt can only imagine how they lasted in Lima that long, and Quinn is broken like razor shards of glass.

“Quiet,” Kurt says, and can only hope to instead apply that proactively to the days ahead.

 

~~~

 

She might talk a good game, but Santana hasn't really spent all that much of her life outside the city of Lima. Lima Heights doesn't count, not when she could see the lights in Lima at night through her bedroom window.

The only time she's ever _really_ left was the summer her parents put her on a train down to the province of Cumberland to stay with her aunt and uncle for a couple of months. Apparently going from one tiny little nothing town surrounded by trees, to another tiny little nothing town surrounded by cotton fields, was supposed to make her a better person or something.

Cumberland was hot and sticky-damp, full of white-skinned boys with sunblond hair baked red and tan by the sun, and black-haired girls who would've been brown or golden even in the dead of winter. Santana's aunt Roxana fried things in dough and made weird sweet custards for dessert. Her cousins all gobbled them down like they were expecting some kind of famine, but Marcela never brought that boy down the road home for dinner while Santana was there.

It was an okay summer, she guesses, besides the heat; she learned how to kiss, and how to do that thing with her tongue that makes every guy's eyes cross that she's ever tried it on. She learned that white boys in Cumberland liked girls whose grandparents grew up in Havanah even less than the ones in Lima, although they didn't really seem to care while she was doing that thing with her tongue. She learned a whole bunch of new words for herself and her mom and her aunt Roxana that she mostly kept to herself.

When she got home that fall, though, Brittany was way quiet and wanted to spend even less time as a human than before, plus she'd forgotten like half of the reading they'd been working on. So that was when Santana decided that if she ever left Lima Heights again, Brittany was coming with her, and they weren't going to end up on any cotton farm down in fucking _Cumberland_.

She hasn't actually left Ohio Territory since then. Sue's troop doesn't really cross provincial borders. Mostly whenever the team's gone out, it's been a quick wham-bam-here's your new rug, ma'am, sort of thing. This'll be the farthest Santana's gone without a collar since that summer she was fourteen. It's probably the farthest Brittany's gone without a collar, ever.

Britt's sniffing along the side of the road where Quinn and Puck's scents get replaced by truck fuel and tar. They've got to be smart about this. Santana lets herself fall back human-form and sighs.

“So if I were the Frankenklutz, where would I take my cheating girlfriend and the son of a bitch who was screwing her?” she muses aloud. “He's like the ultimate Deputy Do-No-Wrong, no way he'd actually have the guts to take them out to some quarry and shoot the both of them.” Brittany noses in under one hand and Santana absently scratches her behind the ears. “Hold still a sec, let me grab that map.”

Sue took all their uniforms _and_ their weapons, but you don't need magic to carry a backpack as a wolf so long as somebody with hands is around to tie it on once you're shifted. Brittany lowers her head obligingly for Santana to find and untie the rolled-up map.

Ohio Territory, piece of shit that it is, unfurls before her. One hundred and seven territory districts, and enough buttfuck flyspeck towns to choke a whore. Okay, Finn Hudson. Where do you run from the big bad wolves?

The name of a town catches the corner of her eye, and Santana starts to smile. “Oh, Finnocence,” she says, shaking her head. “Tell me you didn't run home crying to your mommy.”

Brittany cocks her head to one side and whines, impatient to get going, and Santana is with her all the way. It's kind of cold to be standing around naked anyway. She rolls the map back up and tucks it safely into the backpack weighing Brittany down. They'd take turns, but Britt isn't really so good with knots.

The settle of fur back across her shoulders comes warm and comfortable. She flicks her tail in Brittany's direction. 'Race you?', it says, and Britt's ears and muzzle twitch in something just the same as a grin.

 

~~~

 

Rachel stays behind to help her clean up, after Artie and Tina take off a couple of hours before sundown. They light a fire in the little pit Mercedes dug when she moved in here, five or six years ago, and hang a pot of dried corn and oil over it to pop while they pull on something like clothing.

Rachel's dads like having some time to themselves after the moon, and Mercedes can't blame them. Her parents had grandpuppies running around with the pack by the time she split off, so it's not like they're ever going to turn out like one of those solitary old human couples either, but living with Rachel for twenty-plus years with no other family around to take her out of their fur for a while _can't_ have been any picnic. Sometimes the three of them all hang out at Kurt's house, curled up in warm flannel pyjamas in his basement, but with Finn and his friends back in town Mercedes can only figure that house has got enough wolf in it for a while.

“So how long d'you think Little Miss Fangs and her horny bodyguard are going to be around?” Mercedes asks, settling right back down on the pile of furs where she spent most of the day. “'Cause if that's where all their 'special Sue Sylvester training' gets them, I kinda want them gone before the next full moon.”

“I don't know.” Rachel sounds oddly thoughtful. “I think we should go by Kurt's house tomorrow to see them.”

Mercedes raises her eyebrows. “You don't think Mr. and Mrs. Hummel have enough werewolves on their hands right now? Anyway, we're not supposed to have met them, remember? They spent the full moon in a cage at Tina's.”

“Then that's the perfect excuse to go over and visit,” says Rachel, with the kind of determined cheer that Mercedes just _knows_ means there's no use arguing. “Mr. and Mrs. Hummel know how I like to drop in and welcome other wolves to the district with a well-rehearsed song and a tin of cookies. It'll give us an excuse to actually talk to them without the influence of our regular monthly insanity clouding things.”

“And of course this doesn't have anything to do with Finn Hudson being back in town,” says Mercedes. Rachel ducks her head, suddenly very interested in the popcorn bowl.

“He's Kurt's brother, of course I'm glad he's back,” she says.

“Rachel, you know I love you,” Mercedes says honestly, “but you have _got_ to stop falling for these human guys. Epic star-crossed romance is one thing, but—”

“I don't have a crush,” Rachel says, quick and firm like she only ever gets when everybody knows she's lying. “I only ever actually saw him a few times, he was very nice despite being a human who could probably have us all killed without anybody who matters even blinking, and I'm happy for Kurt. This is something completely different.” And okay, that's a different tone entirely, which means there really is something else going on here. “You know how I'm a little bit psychic, right?”

Mercedes groans. “You mean the 'little bit psychic' that said we were gonna have floods all summer two years ago, right before that drought? Yeah, I remember that.” Okay, Rachel's hunches are right a lot more often than they're wrong, but...

“Well, my psychic sense is telling me that something's coming,” Rachel says firmly. “There's something about those two wolves that's going to be important to us, and I intend to find out what as soon as possible.”

“Yeah, well I intend to not get my throat ripped out by any crazy bitches who don't know how to handle a moon,” says Mercedes. “My momma always said, you see how somebody is on the full moon, you know what they're really like.”

Tina's even a little shy when she's fired up like lightening, though it goes away fast. Artie never ends up somehow in charge of the pack the rest of the month, and Kurt's usually never open to come-ons from passing dogs who may or may not take 'no' for an answer. Mercedes would be, she thinks. She hasn't really had an opportunity to find out. Of course Rachel can always be trusted to go right for the most dramatic thing possible, no matter what else is going on.

 

~~~

 

Here are the things Tina likes: red roses, terrible romance novels, old folk songs, puppies, babies, dancing in her bare feet, and sex while they're both human.

Here are some things Artie isn't very good at: sex while he's human, dancing while he's human, taking long romantic walks while he's human, and explaining how he can hate being a werewolf so much more than he's ever hated actually being the wolf.

Tina goes home after they leave Mercedes' den. It's been a long night and they probably both need some time alone. Unfortunately, Artie isn't going to get any, because if Tina's not with him he's going to have to face his family. That's another thing he's not so good at doing, but until he follows his brother and sisters, finds a job, gets married, moves out, and stops turning into a wolf all the time, he's really just going to have to deal with it.

The Abrams farmhouse has been in the family for about four generations, since the old farmhouse out on the northwest corner of the property burned down when Artie's great-great-grandfather's senile great aunt Roberta tried to cook a Sunday roast. Artie's bedroom used to be a back pantry, right off the kitchen, with a divided half-door opening on to his mom's herb garden. Most of the old shelves are still up, full of books and folded clothes he doesn't usually wear. They're a little inconveniently high when Tina's not over, but his dad meant well. At least it's easier to reach them now than it was when he was twelve.

It's about dinner time when Artie lopes up to the farmhouse, careful not to step on any of his mother's plants. The top half of his door is open again, even though the room inside is too small for him to actually attempt a flying leap over it if he doesn't want to slide head-first into the wall. The air smells moist and a little threatening, but it hasn't rained yet, so the inside's probably dry this time.

He's been wolf since sunrise, iron-clenched, and most of yesterday too. It's not even hard to hold it any more; whatever strength or muscles keep a man tied into wolf shape, Artie's been gripping with them tight enough to cramp and stiffen into place for years. It takes a deep breath and a mental count backwards from five to relax them, let the fur and tail and uninjured limbs slip through his jaws or metaphorical fingers, until he opens his eyes to the blue paint of the farmhouse and the prick of gravel against his soft bare palms.

He has to haul himself upright using the door, so he can reach over the top to unlock it and let himself in. Standing by himself isn't _that_ big of a deal, it's just the 'sustained balance' thing that's kind of difficult to work with. His bedroom isn't really any warmer than the outside air. He shuts the top door when he gets inside, slides the latch back to lock it. Nobody will need to open it again tonight.

The farmhouse was built for a dozen people at minimum, but none of Artie's siblings who've gotten married really want their kids around the Family Werewolf, so there's just six of them now, plus Artie: two parents, his great-aunt Deborah, his youngest sister, and Jim and Steve the farmhands. Sooner or later his dad's going to have to do something about giving the farm over to his oldest brother Toby like he always said. None of them are getting any younger. Artie's not exactly looking forward to it—Toby's not a _bad_ brother but he's definitely going to have something to say about wolves living in the house and the empty cage out in the old barn—but family's family.

He pulls on clothes before straining upwards to fish the house key down from the lintel and letting himself into the kitchen. The Abramses have never exactly been formal, so it opens right onto the dining room. Six heads look up from their baked ham and cornbread when Artie limps in.

“I'll just get out of your way,” Artie promises.

His dad will want to sit him down and talk about _how did last night go?_ with his stern, thoughtful expression, but not until after dinner, and Artie's hungry now. He should have just caught a rabbit on his way home. If he could spend less time trying to go around human like this, he could probably get away with a diet of almost nothing but raw meat.

There's a second pan of cornbread sitting out to cool next to the stove; he glances up at his mom for permission and she nods, so he slices out half the pan. He'll come out for the leftover ham after everybody else is asleep.

 

~~~

 

The sun creeps down past the horizon without any of the fanfare of last night. Another day, another month gone by, another four weeks before they have to do this all over again. Quinn wonders if she'll still be alive to see it, next month.

Finn came home about an hour ago, beelined towards the smell of cooking chicken pot pie in the kitchen, then, when his mother good-naturedly shooed him away from the stove with a flick of her towel, finally turned back to Quinn. She let him have his hug, tighter than usual, longer, burying his nose in her hair like his human nose could actually smell what kind of difference the moon left on her. She turned her head away when he ducked in for a kiss.

Puck had tried to entice her onto the couch next to him earlier to cuddle along with his completely faked nap. Kurt folded himself onto the settee next to Mrs. Hummel as soon as he was done inhaling the plate she'd made up for him, filching a spare needle and thread out of her sewing basket and starting in on some embroidery along the opposite hem of the skirt in her lap like they did this all the time. They barely spoke, just little workman's murmurs, reminders to keep out of each others' light as the sunbeams shifted across the floor.

If this is how Finn grew up, no wonder he'd never shoved her away, all the long mornings she'd come to him to cling through her own comedown. He'd nearly always worked full moon night and two or three straight nights before, so he'd have that day off. Quinn had let herself hope it might be because he was in love with her.

She's taken too much comfort from him already: his open arms, open home, open heart. Finn trusted her, and she'd destroyed him. And now she's sitting for the second time at his mother's own table like a guest. Quinn doesn't know about Finn's mother, but hers had had a saying: 'Guests, like fish, start to smell after three days'.

Quinn kept herself, straight-backed, stiff and solitary in the purple wingback chair near the fire all afternoon. The dim lighting made the cramped print of the Bible hard to read, but she really only needed the suggestion of a reminder, anyway.

 _Her adversaries are the chief, her enemies prosper; for the LORD hath afflicted her for the multitude of her transgressions: her children are gone into captivity before the enemy. And from the daughter of Zion all her beauty is departed: her princes are become like harts that find no pasture, and they are gone without strength before the pursuer._ The Lord watches, the Lord knows, and the Lord punishes as He will. And Quinn can't stay here.

She can't stay anywhere, really. She doesn't get to. Sue will be after her soon enough, if she isn't already, for some crime imagined or not. Sinner or not, Quinn doesn't want to die, not yet. She doesn't think she deserves it so much more than any of the other troop wolves she's worked with.

Of course, Finn Hudson, who's across the table smiling at her like there's not a sliver of gap between them, shoveling chicken and gravy into his mouth like the district just declared them all on rations, deserves it all even less.


End file.
